Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

One challenge in providing an adequate definition of physical disability is unifying the heterogeneous bodily conditions that count as disabilities. We examine recent proposals by Elizabeth Barnes (2016), and Dana Howard and Sean Aas (2018), and show how this debate has reached an impasse. Barnes’ account struggles to deliver principled unification of the category of disability, whilst Howard and Aas’ account risks inappropriately sidelining the body. We argue that this impasse can be broken using a novel concept: marginalised functioning. Marginalised (...) functioning concerns the relationship between a person’s bodily capacities and their social world: specifically, their ability to function in line with the default norms about how people can typically physically function that influence the structuring of social space. We argue that attending to marginalised functioning allows us to develop, not one, but three different models of disability, all of which—whilst having different strengths and weaknesses—unify the category of disability without sidelining the body. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.

Stories evoke emotions in their hearers. Do they evoke emotions in their tellers as well? Tellers can tell stories from the inside as if they were characters in the world of the tale or they can tell stories from the outside as if they were perceiving the taleworld from elsewhere. From the outside, the teller can represent the emotion a character feels; from the inside, the teller can express the emotion the character feels. In either instance, tellers can be moved (...) by the story they tell. When they are, they can experience their emotions as a suffusion of sensation that springs forth in their bodies. The body’s experience of its sensation can appear in the gestures that accompany the telling. On the occasion presented here, the teller represents her emotion in metaphorical gestures that figure her body as the container of a fluid substance that threatens to overflow its boundaries. Her gestures disclose and elaborate this metaphoricity while at the same time disclosing and elaborating the sensations that motivate the metaphor. (shrink)

In order to conduct medical examinations, physicians transform patients from social subjects into medical objects. The routines associated with conducting medical examinations constitute rituals for effecting this transformation: moving from public space to private space; changing into ritual costumes; taking up ritual positions in an examination room; conducting ritual verbal and physical examinations. The transformations endow participants with a different ontological status from the one they hold in everyday life. They address the phenomenological problem of how a self is inserted (...) into a body. (shrink)

Scholars often argue that Charles Sanders Peirce was responsible for Josiah Royce's semiotic turn in _The Problem of Christianity_ of 1913. Thus scholars tend to assume that a _Roycean_ approach to semiotics was a later development and derives almost entirely from Peirce's semiotics. Far from a later development, Royce probably read Peirce much earlier. Indeed, even before Royce had read Peirce, the kernel of a Rocyean approach to semiotics is found in the dissertation of 1878. Thus the (...) present essay will prove that a Roycean approach to semiotics did not have a basis in Peirce's semiotics, whether early or later, but rather grew out of Royce's earliest writings. The first part will reconstruct the early pragmatism in the dissertation of 1878 and find that the kernal of a Roycean approach to semiotics was the idea of a _mediating third_. The second part will show how the disseration's pragmatism develops into a phenomenology of time that contains Royce's earliest semiosic insights. The third part will explain how the early pragmatism and phenomenology come together in the argument on the possibility of error from Royce's _The Religious Aspect of Philosophy_ of 1885. The possibility of error is Royce's original argument for absolute idealism, so the essay will conclude that a Roycean approach to semiotics entails a semiotics of the absolute. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th century, Josiah Royce participated in what has come to be called the great debate (Royce, 1897; Armour, 2005).1 The great debate concerned issues in metaphysical theology, and, since metaphysics was primarily idealistic, it dealt considerably with the relations between the divine Self and lesser selves. After the great debate, Royce developed his idealism in his Gifford Lectures (1898-1900). These were published as The World and the Individual. At the end of the (...) first volume, Royce added a Supplementary Essay. The Essay, continuing themes from the great debate, developed an intriguing mathematical model of the relations between the divine Self and lesser selves. The second volume went on to.. (shrink)

While acknowledging a certain affinity between his own thought and the Vedanta concept of a world-soul or universal spirit, Josiah Royce nevertheless locates this concept primarily in what he terms the Second Conception of Being—Mysticism. In his early magnum opus, The World and the Individual, Royce utilizes aspects of the Upanishads in order to flesh out his picture of the mystical understanding of and relationship to being. My primary concern in the present investigation is to introduce some nuance (...) into Royce’s conception of Indian thought, which may then serve to suggest similar possibilities for nuance for Royce’s conception of the Absolute. I will attempt to do in two primary ways: first, I will consider Royce’s use of Indian thought via the Upanishads in explicating his second historical conception of Being. I will then turn briefly to Emerson’s poem ‘Brahma’ and the Bhagavad Gita to see if a certain reversal that occurs in both places problematizes Royce’s depiction of the universal spirit in Indian thought as well as opens up new possibilities for Royce’s own Absolute. (shrink)

This essay examines how, in the early twentieth century, ontological arguments were employed in the defense of metaphysical idealism. The idealists of the period tended to grant that ontological arguments defy our usual expectations in logic, and so they were less concerned with the formal properties of Anselmian arguments. They insisted, however, that ontological arguments are indispensable, and they argued that we can trust argumentation as such only if we presume that there is a valid ontological argument. In the first (...) section I outline the history of this metalogical interpretation of the ontological argument. In the subsequent sections I explain how Royce and Collingwood each developed the argument, and how this impacted their respective conceptions of both logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have increasingly paid attention to the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Long lost in the shadow of fellow classical American figures, Royce’s philosophy has enjoyed a renascence, with a spate of publications in a variety of venues studying and applying his thought.1 Like his philosophical brethren, Royce wrote on a wide variety of subjects, his discussions underpinned by a smattering of influences. Much has been remarked of the various Western sources that made an impression (...) on Royce’s thought, but comparatively little has been said of his indebtedness to Eastern sources. Kurt Leidecker’s Josiah Royce and Indian Thought2 and Frank M... (shrink)

Curious about the nature of light, Robert Boyle spent a series of late nights taking detailed observations of shining veal shanks, stinking fish, pieces of rotten wood which glowed in the dark, and a ‘noctiluca’ distilled from human urine. Once, report Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, with "only a foot-boy" to assist him, Boyle put a luminous diamond to the nocturnal test, "plunging it into oil and acid, spitting on it, and ‘taking it into bed with me, and holding (...) it a good while upon a warm part of my naked body’". (shrink)

Interpretations of Peirce’s development after 1898 often mix three kinds of arguments: one argument about belief, one argument about philosophy and practice, and one argument about the causal role of James’s writings on Peirce’s development. I shall focus here on the last two points: theory and practice and the alleged role of James. James’s role in Peirce’s development is somewhat overestimated and one can doubt Peirce’s worries about the dogmatic use of the scientific method and of philosophy in morals are (...) conditioned by James’s writings only. Peirce’s re-readings and refinements of his Illustrations started no later than the early 1880s, at a time when James was not as central a reference as it became after 1900 for the philosophic stage. To support that claim, I wish to focus here on one particular point: the distrust towards those who try to “mingle” philosophy and practice is by no means a new theme in the 1890s. One of the most telling examples of such a claim is the 1885 review of Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, some thirteen years before the quarrel over pragmatism started. (shrink)

The paper investigates the role played by pre-scientific experience in the philosophy of Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. Such a notion, generally associated with Husserl’s conception of the life-world (Lebenswelt) in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), finds an equivalent and historical antecedent in Royce’s distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation. The final goal is to show how, despite their different philosophical frameworks, Royce and Husserl agree on the idea (...) that, through the rejection of the world given through mere perception (Lebenswelt/world of appreciation), European sciences have somehow failed their task of universality. As it will be shown, this idea is also due to methodological affinities among the two thinkers. The experience of interconnectedness among individual minds, while precluded in the mere scientific explanation of the world, it becomes possible through the enactment of the Lebenswelt or, as in Royce’s case, through a return to the experience of the world of appreciation. (shrink)

This essay analyzes two diverse interpretations of Christian love in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Josiah Royce. Through the comparison of these two positions, I attempt to show not only the embeddedness of a conception of love in an entire theological vision but its usefulness as a lens for examining that position. I argue that Kierkegaard's interpretation of love tends to foster social inequality, a tendency rooted in his basic ontology. The Roycean view of love, resting upon a (...) radically different ontology, avoids such problematic ethical implications. (shrink)

in early 2019, the josiah royce society arranged two Author Meets Critics sessions on Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of white Racial Empire. The first was held in New York City, at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting. The second was at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, in Columbus, Ohio. The sessions were vibrant and well-attended. With the exception of a few tendentious (...) questions at the close of the second meeting, however, our sessions lacked the element of controversy that is customary in discussions of racism in the history of philosophy. The panelists and the audience alike rather... (shrink)

Every idealist believes himself to have rational grounds for the faith that somewhere, and in some world, and at some time, the ideal will triumph, so that a survey, a divine synopsis of all time, somehow reveals the lesson of all sorrow, the meaning of all tragedy, the triumph of the spirit. But it is not ours to say, in the world in which we at present have to live from one day to another, and to follow the fortunes of (...) man from one newspaper to another,--when and how the true revelation of the world's meaning is faced and[ found. The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, Vol. II, p. 1146.]. (shrink)

Feminism has long grappled with its own demarcation problem—exactly what is it to be a woman?—and the rise of trans-inclusive feminism has made this problem more urgent. I will first consider Sally Haslanger’s “social and hierarchical” account of woman, resulting from “Ameliorative Inquiry”: she balances ordinary use of the term against the instrumental value of novel definitions in advancing the cause of feminism. Then, I will turn to Katharine Jenkins’ charge that Haslanger’s view suffers from an “Inclusion Problem”: it (...) fails to class many trans women as women. Jenkins offers a novel norm-relevancy account of woman to avoid the Inclusion Problem. Unfortunately, Jenkins’ account has serious internal problems, i.e. problems by Jenkins’ own lights: it is unintelligible, or it suffers from an Inclusion Problem of its own. After that, I will develop novel arguments for the conclusion that the project of Ameliorative Inquiry is both incoherent and also impossible to complete—at least, impossible to complete in a trans-inclusive way. Trans-inclusive feminism, therefore, would do well to move beyond Ameliorative Inquiry. Insofar as that’s not possible, trans-inclusive feminism inherits the incoherence of Ameliorative Inquiry. (shrink)

What is a woman? The definition of this central concept of feminism has lately become especially controversial and politically charged. “Ameliorative Inquirists” have rolled up their sleeves to reengineer our ordinary concept of womanhood, with a goal of including in the definition all and only those who identify as women, both “cis” and “trans.” This has proven to be a formidable challenge. Every proposal so far has failed to draw the boundaries of womanhood in a way acceptable to the Ameliorative (...) Inquirists, since not all those who identify as women count as women on these proposals, and some who count as women on these proposals don’t identify as women. This is the Trans Inclusion Problem. Is there any solution? Can there be? Recently, Katharine Jenkins, pointing to the work of Mari Mikkola, suggests that the Trans Inclusion Problem can be “deflated” rather than solved. We will investigate this proposal, and show that, unfortunately, Jenkins is mistaken: Mikkola’s project will not help us answer the Trans Inclusion Problem. After that, we’ll look at Robin Dembroff’s suggestion that we “imitate” the linguistic practices of trans inclusive and queer communities, and we will evaluate whether this would help us solve the Trans Inclusion Problem. Unfortunately, this strategy also fails to solve the problem. By the end, we’ll have a better appreciation of the challenges faced by Ameliorative Inquirists in their project of redefining “woman,” and clearer view of why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot, in fact, be solved. That’s primarily because, no matter what it means to be a woman, it’s one thing to be a woman, and another thing to identify as a woman. (shrink)

A theory of gender ought to be compatible with trans-inclusive definitions of gender identity terms, such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Appealing to this principle of trans-inclusion, Katharine Jenkins argues that we ought to endorse a dual social position and identity theory of gender. Here, I argue that Jenkins’s dual theory of gender fails to be trans-inclusive for the following reasons: it cannot generate a definition of ‘woman’ that extends to include all trans women, and it understands transgender gender identity (...) through a cisgender frame. (shrink)

Our gender identity is our sense of ourselves as a woman, a man, as genderqueer, or as another gender. Our gender is the property we have of being a woman, being a man, being non-binary, or being another gender. What is the relationship between our gender identity and our gender? Recently, much work has been done on ameliorative accounts of the gender concepts that we should accept and on the metaphysics of gender properties. From this work 4 views of the (...) relationship between having gender identity G (e.g. having a female gender identity) and being a gender G (e.g. being a woman) have emerged. A first, the no connection view, says that gender identity and gender are entirely distinct; Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative account of gender, as well as Theodore Bach’s account of gender properties, are instances of this view. A second, the gender-identity-first view, says that all there is to our gender is our gender identity; this view is at least similar to views that Talia Bettcher and R.A. Briggs and B.R. George have argued for. A third, contextualist view, says that in some contexts and relative to certain standards, our gender identity determines our gender, and that in others it does not; Ásta and Robin Dembroff have proposed and defended views along these lines. A fourth view, the two gender properties view, says that there are two properties that can make it the case that one is gender G (in any context), one’s having gender identity G and one’s being socially classed as a G; Katharine Jenkins and Elizabeth Barnes have proposed views along these lines. This article explains these 4 different views and spells out their prospects, and the problems they face, as both ameliorative and as metaphysical views. (shrink)

Philosophers of literature do not take much of an interest in autobiography.1 In one sense this is not surprising. As a certain prejudice has it, autobiography is, along with biography, the preferred reading of people who do not really like to read. The very words can conjure up images of what one finds on bookshelves in Florida retirement communities and in underfunded public libraries, books with titles like Under the Rainbow: The Real Liza Minnelli or Me: Stories of My Life (...) (Katharine Hepburn).2 Hardly rousing material, at least from the philosophical point of view. But on a moment’s reflection, it becomes clear that the initial prejudice is unfounded. Never mind the fact that there are obviously .. (shrink)

Susanne Langer was a student at Radcliffe College between 1916 and 1926---a highly transitional period in the history of American philosophy. Intellectual generalists such as William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce had dominated philosophical debates at the turn of the century but the academic landscape gradually started to shift in the years after World War I. Many scholars of the new generation adopted a more piecemeal approach to philosophy---solving clearly delineated, technical puzzles using the so-called “method of logical (...) analysis”. Especially at Harvard, the intellectual climate rapidly changed. The department hired several philosophers who had contributed to the development of symbolic logic---H. M. Sheffer, C. I. Lewis, and A. N. Whitehead---and Harvard quickly began to be viewed as a central hub for analytic philosophy in the United States. This chapter contextualizes Langer’s earliest work by reading it through the lens of this shifting academic environment. Though Harvard did not allow women to take its courses until 1943, Langer is one of the most significant fruits of this period. Her dissertation “A Logical Analysis of Meaning” and her first publications are all illustrations of the approach that came to dictate the American philosophical conversation. By exploring the increased focus on the logical-analytic method and Langer’s attempts to expand the new approach to what she later called “non-discursive” symbolisms, I situate her publications in the intellectual context of the 1920s. (shrink)

The image of the “mirror” (鏡kagami) appears frequently in the philosophical texts of Nishida Kitaro (西田幾多郎1870-1945), where it assumes various functions. Mirror references first occur in meditations on the philosophies of Josiah Royce (1855-1916) and Henri Bergson (1859-1941). The most fascinating evocation here corresponds to the idea of a “self-enlightening mirror”, used to probe the philosophical ground for self-illumination. This idea seems to point back to Buddhist meaning that intervenes in Japanese intellectual history. We take this as our warrant (...) for establishing here, firstly, how Nishidean philosophical speculation can be critically related to the thought of Dogen (道元1200-1253); and, secondly, in what sense it has stimulated some contemporary approaches in Japanese philosophy (for example, those of Nitta, Ohashi, and Sakabe). (shrink)

Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden presents a rigorous intellectual history of Josiah Royce’s essays on race. Curry explains the several arguments that Royce made on this topic between 1900 and 1908, and he situates these within Royce’s social philosophy and some contemporaneous literatures on racism. The result is a comprehensive theory of cultural assimilation informed by an idealist metaphysics. Royce, namely, disdained segregation and rejected biological accounts of racial difference. But Royce scholars have (...) wrongly taken these observations, Curry argues, as evidence that their hero held progressive views on race. Royce rather began from the premise of Anglo-American cultural superiority, and... (shrink)

Examining AI spirituality can illuminate problematic assumptions about human spirituality and AI cognition, suggest possible directions for AI development, reduce uncertainty about future AI, and yield a methodological lens sufficient to investigate human-AI sociotechnical interaction and morality. Incompatible philosophical assumptions about human spirituality and AI limit investigations of both and suggest a vast gulf between them. An emergentist approach can replace dualist assumptions about human spirituality and identify emergent behavior in AI computation to overcome overly reductionist assumptions about computation. Using (...) general systems theory to organize models of human experience yields insight into human morality and spirituality, upon which AI modeling can also draw. In this context, the pragmatist Josiah Royce’s semiotic philosophy of spirituality identifies unanticipated overlap between symbolic AI and spirituality and suggests criteria for a human-AI community focused on modeling morality that would result in an emergent Interpreter-Spirit sufficient to influence the ongoing development of human and AI morality and spirituality. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway’s work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value. -/- Hookway’s original and extensive studies of Charles S. Peirce have made him among the most admired and frequently referenced of Peirce’s interpreters. His work on classical American pragmatism has explored the philosophies of William James, (...) John Dewey, and Josiah Royce, and examined the influence of pragmatist ideas outside of the United States. Additionally, Hookway has participated in a number of celebrated exchanges with some of the most high-profile figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, including Karl-Otto Apel, Philip Pettit, Hilary Putnam, and W.V.O. Quine, through which his treatments of a large range of topics in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and language have been developed and promoted. The chapters in this book—which include contributions from several of Hookway’s former students and colleagues—include studies of Hookway’s engagement with the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey, his contributions to virtue epistemology, and his discussions of hope and pragmatist metaphysics. -/- Pragmatic Reason will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and epistemology. (shrink)

Two blocks from the new Rolls-Royce showroom with its mindboggling prices, two street peddlers say they don’t pay attention to the luxurious rides now mixing amid hordes of motorbikes. Why should they?

Claims are universal when they are not dependent on when and where they are made. Mathematics and the natural sciences are the typical disciplines that allow such claims to be made. Is the striving for universal claims in other disciplines justified? Those who attempt to answer this question in the affirmative often argue that it is justified when mathematics and the natural sciences are taken as the model for other disciplines. In this paper I challenge this position and analyze the (...) issue by looking at it from a new angle, a perspective that involves two key concepts: violence and loyalty. The result of this analysis throws light on the broader question concerning what the search for truth might mean in a pluralistic world. (shrink)