Fred Adams and collaborators advocate a view on which empty-name sentences semantically encode incomplete propositions, but which can be used to conversationally implicate descriptive propositions. This account has come under criticism recently from Marga Reimer and Anthony Everett. Reimer correctly observes that their account does not pass a natural test for conversational implicatures, namely, that an explanation of our intuitions in terms of implicature should be such that we upon hearing it recognize it to be roughly correct. Everett argues that (...) the implicature view provides an explanation of only some of our intuitions, and is in fact incompatible with others, especially those concerning the modal profile of sentences containing empty names. I offer a pragmatist treatment of empty names based upon the recognition that the Gricean distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive, and argue that such a solution avoids both Everett's and Reimer's criticisms. (shrink)

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

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...) themselves substantive. (shrink)

This is a creative-commons licensed guide. Its purpose is to provide students with an understanding of some ways in which they might contribute to philosophical conversation. It is also available for free use via my website.

This chapter weighs a challenge to the attractive notion that by enabling empathy, fiction affords wide-ranging knowledge of what others’ experiences are like. It is commonly held that ‘seeing the world through others’ eyes’ often requires the empathizer to undergo an imaginative shift in sensibility, and we might naturally think that fiction helps us to effect that shift. However, some recent work on empathy and imagination encourages the conclusion that we are actually rigidly restricted to our own sensibilities even in (...) the wildest flights of imagination great literature can inspire. Drawing on the work of the novelist Zadie Smith, the chapter argues that while our imaginative capacities are not entirely unconstrained by our sensibilities, fiction can still help us to learn about a wide range of human experiences, including the experiences of people whose sensibilities substantially diverge from our own. Notably, fiction can work on our patterns of attention in such a way that we become temporarily ‘not ourselves.’. (shrink)

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together happily. Knowers engage one another (...) on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a new interpretation of Stoic ontology. I aim to explain the nature of, and relations between, (i) the fundamental items of their physics, bodies; (ii) the incorporeal items about which they theorized no less; and (iii) universals, towards which the Stoic attitude seems to be a bizarre mixture of realism and anti-realism. In the first half of the paper I provide a new model to explain the relationship between those items in (i) and (ii). This (...) model clears up several problems in Stoicism and gives a precise answer to the question of how bodies and incorporeals differ in their mode of being. The second half of the paper considers the vexed issue of the status of those items in (iii), Stoic universals. (shrink)

In this article, we describe what cryptocurrency is, how it works, and how it relates to familiar conceptions of and questions about money. We then show how normative questions about monetary policy find new expression in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These questions can play a role in addressing not just what money is, but what it should be. A guiding theme in our discussion is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results (...) of disciplines like computer science and economics. Note: this article is the first entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience (...) daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different (...) types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

Most business in the Philippines is mostly in the microenterprise. Hence, this research was accomplished in order to assess the effectiveness of financial management practices of microenterprises in Quezon City. The city was selected as the locale of the research since there were various microenterprises built in this location. The respondents were classified according to the number of years in operation of their business, the number of employees, capitalization, and their source of funds. Additionally, the individual profile was also classified (...) into their age, highest educational attainment, and the number of seminars or trainings related to their business that they had attended. The assessment was specified into aspects of financial planning, financial control, and cash management. The result shows that most businesses were newly established and only operating for zero (0) to two (2) years. The result also showed that most of the respondents only had a capitalization of PHP 100,000.00 and they were utilizing their personal savings as a source of funds. Most of them are aged from twenty-one (21) to thirty (30) years with no bachelor’s degrees. They only attended seminars and training less than three (3) times. The result of this study was beneficial to business owners, local government units, government, government agencies, banks, and other financial institutions, academe, and future researchers. (shrink)

Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks—at least one for each responsibility concept—and, I will suggest, (...) a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question. (shrink)

George Yancy's interview with Alison Bailey addresses what it means for Whites to be "privilege-cognizant but metaphysically comfortable.” .

I examine two startling claims attributed to some philosophers associated with Megara on the Isthmus of Corinth, namely: Ml. Something possesses a capacity at t if and only if it is exercising that capacity at t. M2. One can speak of a thing only by using its own proper A6yor;. In what follows, I will call the conjunction of Ml and M2 'Megaricism' .1 The lit­ erature on ancient philosophy contains several valuable discussions of Ml and M2 taken individually .2 (...) But there is no discussion of them together, much less of their logical relations. I intend to remedy that lack, and to show why it is a lack worth remedying. My aims are both philosophical and historical. Inevitably, in saying anything new and interesting about Megaric views, I will be adopting assumptions scarcely free from controversy, and indulging in quite a bit of charitable recon­ struction. But the resulting picture is of considerable interest. For it explains why, although Ml and M2 seem to have little to do with one another, it is in fact small wonder that anyone who held one would hold the other, for, as I attempt to show, they entail each other. It explains why the Megarics are associated in the primary literature with the names of such diverse philosophical ancestors as Parmenides and Protagoras. And it explains why, although they are both false, Ml and M2 were claims taken seriously by both Plato and Aristotle, who in developing their own views on modality and language saw reason to mention Megaricism, and to argue against it. (shrink)

Garrath Williams claims that truly responsible people must possess a “capacity … to respond [appropriately] to normative demands” (2008:462). However, there are people whom we would normally praise for their responsibility despite the fact that they do not yet possess such a capacity (e.g. consistently well-behaved young children), and others who have such capacity but who are still patently irresponsible (e.g. some badly-behaved adults). Thus, I argue that to qualify for the accolade “a responsible person” one need not possess such (...) a capacity, but only to be earnestly willing to do the right thing and to have a history that testifies to this willingness. Although we may have good reasons to prefer to have such a capacity ourselves, and to associate ourselves with others who have it, at a conceptual level I do not think that such considerations support the claim that having this capacity is a necessary condition of being a responsible person in the virtue sense. (shrink)

This Paper Offers A New Interpretation of Phaedo 96a–103a. Plato has devoted the dialogue up to this point to a series of arguments for the claim that the soul is immortal. However, one of the characters, Cebes, insists that so far nothing more has been established than that the soul is durable, divine, and in existence before the incarnation of birth. What is needed is something more ambitious: a proof that the soul is not such as to pass out of (...) existence. According to Socrates’s initial response to Cebes at 95e8–96a1, giving such a demonstration requires a thorough investigation into “the reason for coming to be and passing away in general” (ὅλως γὰϱ δεῖ πεϱὶ γενέσεως ϰαὶ Φθοϱᾶς τὴν αἰτίαν διαπϱαγματεύσασθαι .. (shrink)

It has become standard for feminist philosophers of language to analyze Catherine MacKinnon's claim in terms of speech act theory. Backed by the Austinian observation that speech can do things and the legal claim that pornography is speech, the claim is that the speech acts performed by means of pornography silence women. This turns upon the notion of illocutionary silencing, or disablement. In this paper I observe that the focus by feminist philosophers of language on the failure to achieve uptake (...) for illocutionary acts serves to group together different kinds of illocutionary silencing which function in very different ways. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Beall and Restall's claim that there is one true logic of metaphysical modality is incompatible with the formulation of logical pluralism that they give. I investigate various ways of reconciling their pluralism with this claim, but conclude that none of the options can be made to work.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between job burnout and employee performance in the feed industry during the ASF outbreak. Further, the researchers employed a descriptive-correlational research design in order to analyze the acquired data and produce pertinent findings. Thus, the researchers gathered data from one hundred two (102) feed industry employees. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) were employed to ascertain the extent of job burnout experienced by the respondents and evaluate employee performance, (...) respectively. Based on the statistical analysis, there is a significant relationship between job burnout and employee performance. Moreover, the study's findings were thoroughly analyzed and discussed. (shrink)

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

In this paper, I use a comparative analysis of mysticism in Zen and the Abrahamic faiths to formulate a phenomenological account of mysticism “as such.” I argue that, while Zen Buddhism is distinct from other forms of mystical experience in important ways, it can still be fit into a general phenomenological category of mystical experience. First, I explicate the phenomenological accounts of mysticism provided by Anthony Steinbock and Angela Bello. Second, I offer an account of Zen mysticism which both coheres (...) with and problematizes these accounts, arguing that Zen demonstrates the inadequacy of these accounts as descriptions of mysticism as a universal religious category. Lastly, I use this investigation to propose that Zen mysticism does generally cohere with the mystical experiences of other religions, but only if we devise a new formula for speaking phenomenologically about mystical experience as such which captures this phenomenon in all of its manifestations. (shrink)

Alors que les phénoménologues prétendent avoir dépassé le solipsisme, la plupart n’ont en fait que repousser les frontières de l’intersubjectivité des individus humains aux individus des autres espèces. Pourtant, Husserl reconnaît l’existence d’une intersubjectivité interspécifique, c’est-à-dire d’une intersubjectivité dépassant les limites de l’espèce. Il va même jusqu’à affirmer qu’on comprend parfois mieux un animal familier qu’un humain étranger. Toutefois, même s’il admet que plusieurs animaux sont capables d’une vie de conscience subjective et qu’ils vivent dans un monde de sens partagé, (...) il ne les considère pas comme des « personnes » selon sa conception exigeante de la « personne » associée à la rationalité, à la maturité, la normalité et l’historicité. Reste qu’être une « personne », en son sens le plus primordial – et plus décisif puisque c’est celui sur lequel s’édifient des conceptions politiques,juridiques et éthiques – signifie simplement être le sujet d’un monde environnant, d’un monde commun et d’une existence biographique. Distinguer deux sens du concept de personne permet de reconnaître que les animaux ont part à la transcendantalité, qu’ils ne sont pas simplement en vie mais ont une vie à la fois biographique et communautaire, même s’ils ne sont pas en mesure de réfléchir à cette vie de conscience qui est la leur pour considérer leur place dans l’enchaînement des générations et pour adopter ce que Husserl appelle une « vocation ». La phénoménologie husserlienne des anomalies permet ainsi de reconnaître que les animaux ressortissent bien de la figure d’autrui, qu’ils sont des alter ego sujets d’une vie de conscience, et qu’à ce titre ils participent pleinement, comme les enfants, les fous et les étrangers, à la co-constitution du monde de l’esprit. (shrink)

In this paper I address a tension in Samantha Vice’s claim that humility and silence offer effective moral responses to white shame in the wake of South African apartheid. Vice describes these twin virtues using inward-turning language of moral self-repair, but she also acknowledges that this ‘personal, inward directed project’ has relational dimensions. Her failure to explore the relational strand, however, leaves her description of white shame sounding solitary and penitent. -/- My response develops the missing relational dimensions of white (...) shame and humility arguing that this strand, once visible, complicates Vice’s project by (1) challenging her unitary and homogenous view of white identity, and (2) demonstrating the important role vulnerability plays in our understandings of white shame. (shrink)

In the Republic Plato contrasts dialectic with mathematics on the grounds that the former but not the latter gives justifications of some kind for its hypotheses, pursuing this process until it reaches ‘an unhypothetical principle’. But which principles are unhypothetical, and why, is rather dark. One reason for this is the scarcity of forms of that precious word, ‘unhypothetical’ (aνυπoθετος), used only twice by Plato (Rep. 510 b 7, 511 b 6) and just once by Aristotle (Metaph. 1005B14). But that (...) very scarcity also suggests the intriguing possibility that Aristotle has Plato’s text in mind when he uses the word, so we might expect to understand Plato better by grasping how Aristotle took him. That is a notoriously defeasible assumption since plenty of modern accounts of Plato want to save him from Aristotle’s numerous critiques, and hence imply that the master of them that know frequently missed the point when it came to his own master. But surely we can be more confident that Aristotle will give us access to Plato when it appears not merely that he is dealing with the same topic, but using the same rare vocabulary to boot. Hence the understandable temptation to turn to Metaphysics Γ for help in identifying Platonic unhypothetical principles. I shall argue that Aristotle is indeed thinking of Plato’s text when he uses the word for ‘unhypothetical’, and further that what is explicitly an unhypothetical principle for Aristotle might well have been one for Plato too. But later I shall claim that their joint use of a much more common word in the same philosophical context is either coincidence or misunderstanding on Aristotle’s part, for he must mean something different by it from what Plato means. (shrink)

In this paper, we locate a general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people. We argue that this strategy has harmful consequences for oppressed people, breaking down our analysis in terms of individual and structural harms within both epistemic and moral domains. These harms include attempting to undermine the self-trust of oppressed people, reinforcing unjust epistemic power hierarchies, undermining (...) the moral agency of oppressed people, and obscuring real issues of oppression. In light of these many harms, we conclude that there are pro tanto reasons not to employ this strategy, and instead offer a series of suggestions for those considering adopting such a rhetorical move. (shrink)

My engagement with Dotson’s essay begins with an overview of first- and second-order epistemic exclusions. I develop the concept of an "unlevel knowing field." I use examples from the epistemic injustice literature, and some of my own, to highlight the important distinction she makes between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. Next, I turn my attention to her account of third-order epistemic exclusions. I offer a brief explanation of why her sketch of at this level makes an important contribution (...) to the literature on epistemic injustice. In closing I suggest that Dotson’s account of third-order epistemic exclusions has a cognitive bend that limits the resources she might use for bringing about change, and suggest opening up the conversation to include affective, aesthetic or mystical resources. (shrink)

Luck egalitarians think that considerations of responsibility can excuse departures from strict equality. However critics argue that allowing responsibility to play this role has objectionably harsh consequences. Luck egalitarians usually respond either by explaining why that harshness is not excessive, or by identifying allegedly legitimate exclusions from the default responsibility-tracking rule to tone down that harshness. And in response, critics respectively deny that this harshness is not excessive, or they argue that those exclusions would be ineffective or lacking in justification. (...) Rather than taking sides, after criticizing both positions I also argue that this way of carrying on the debate – i.e. as a debate about whether the harsh demands of responsibility outweigh other considerations, and about whether exclusions to responsibility-tracking would be effective and/or justified – is deeply problematic. On my account, the demands of responsibility do not – in fact, they can not – conflict with the demands of other normative considerations, because responsibility only provides a formal structure within which those other considerations determine how people may be treated, but it does not generate its own practical demands. (shrink)

Sara Ruddick's contemporary philosophical account of mothering reconsiders the maternal arguments used in the women's peace movements of the earlier part of this century. The culmination of this project is her 1989 book, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick's project is ground-breaking work in both academic philosophy and feminist theory. -/- In this chapter, I first look at the relationship between the two basic components of Ruddick's argument in Maternal Thinking: the "practicalist conception of truth" (PCT) and feminist (...) standpoint theory (FST). I argue that Ruddick is never clear about the exact relation between the two components. These tensions point to a deeper problem in Ruddick's discussion of the critical power of maternal thinking. -/- The diversity of maternal practices presents a genuine challenge to Ruddick’s account. I argue that neither of the components she explores can adequately ground a feminist peace politics without first answering the question of who speaks for mothers. While I can suggest ways to make Ruddick's argument consistent, she still faces-despite her claims of universality- the deeper problem of reconciling her account of maternal practice with the genuine diversity of actual maternal practices. (shrink)

My project is to explain why the question ‘How does it feel to be a white problem?’ cannot be answered in the fluttering grammar of white talk. The whiteness of white talk lies not only in its having emerged from white mouths, but also in its evasiveness—in its attempt to suppress fear and anxiety, and its consequential [if unintended] reinscription and legitimation of racist oppression. I White talk is designed, indeed scripted, for the purposes of evading, rejecting, and remaining ignorant (...) about the injustices that flow from whiteness and its attendant privileges. I want to suggest a new point of entry—a way to flip the script, so to speak. -/- I begin with some observations about the basic advantages and disadvantages of using white talk as a route into the white problem. My account develops an expanded version of Alice MacIntyre’s definition of white talk that is attentive to the racialized bodily scripts that accompany white talk. I argue that white talk persists because it has an enduring and powerful moral, ontological, and epistemic pay off for white folks. I explore each payoff with an eye towards clarifying how white talk functions to maintain the illusion that we are invulnerable beings. Next, I pause to reply to the popular objection that this particular critique of white talk silences white people in conversations on race. If we cannot address the question ‘how does it feel to be a white problem’ in the fluttering grammar of white talk, then how shall we begin? In closing, I suggest that we might reduce fluttering by replacing white talk with a discourse of vulnerability, where vulnerability is defined not as weakness, but as a condition for potential. I offer some brief guidelines for how we might start this conversation. (shrink)

My contribution to this conversation sets out to accomplish two things: First, I offer a definition of epistemic pushback. Epistemic pushback is an expression of epistemic resistance that occurs regularly in classroom discussions that touch our core beliefs, sense of self, politics, or worldv iews. Epistemic pushback is structural: It broadly characterizes a family of cognitive, affective, and verbal tactics that are deployed regularly to dodge the challenging and exhausting chore of engaging topics and questions that scare us. It can (...) take such forms as direct deep hostility, knee jerk skepticism, or silence. Good teaching should not only track the production of knowledge, but also the production of ignorance. There are forms of epistemic pushback that are ignorance producing, so I work with students to cultivate a mindfulness around epistemic pushback by treating it as a ‘shadow text.’ The remainder of the paper explains the nature of shadow texts, and offers suggestions for how to navigate them. (shrink)

This paper examines how people think about aiding others in a way that can inform both theory and practice. It uses data gathered from Kiva, an online, non-profit organization that allows individuals to aid other individuals around the world, to isolate intuitions that people find broadly compelling. The central result of the paper is that people seem to give more priority to aiding those in greater need, at least below some threshold. That is, the data strongly suggest incorporating both a (...) threshold and a prioritarian principle into the analysis of what principles for aid distribution people accept. This conclusion should be of broad interest to aid practitioners and policy makers. It may also provide important information for political philosophers interested in building, justifying, and criticizing theories about meeting needs using empirical evidence. (shrink)

Book Panel on Zoopolis including articles by Clare Palmer, Dinesh Wadiwel and Laura Janara and a reply by Donaldson and Kymlicka.

Paper presented at the Heidegger Circle 2011. Although Aristotle’s influence on young Heidegger’s thought has been studied at length, such studies have almost exclusively focused on his interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, physics and metaphysics. I will rather address Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s ontology of life. Focusing on recently published or recently translated courses of the mid 20’s (mainly SS 1924, WS 1925-26 and SS 1926), I hope to uncover an important aspect of young Heidegger’s thought left unconsidered: namely, that Dasein’s (...) existential structures – Befindlichkeit, Understanding and being-with-one-another through language – arose from his close reading of Aristotle’s ontology of life, of animal life. (shrink)

It could be argued that tort law is failing, and arguably an example of this failure is the recent public liability and insurance (‘PL&I’) crisis. A number of solutions have been proposed, but ultimately the chosen solution should address whatever we take to be the cause of this failure. On one account, the PL&I crisis is a result of an unwarranted expansion of the scope of tort law. Proponents of this position sometimes argue that the duty of care owed by (...) defendants to plaintiffs has expanded beyond reasonable levels, such that parties who were not really responsible for another’s misfortune are successfully sued, while those who really were to blame get away without taking any responsibility. However people should take responsibility for their actions, and the only likely consequence of allowing them to shirk it is that they and others will be less likely to exercise due care in the future, since the deterrents of liability and of no compensation for accidentally self-imposed losses will not be there. Others also argue that this expansion is not warranted because it is inappropriately fueled by ‘deep pocket’ considerations rather than by considerations of fault. They argue that the presence of liability insurance sways the judiciary to award damages against defendants since they know that insurers, and not the defendant personally, will pay for it in the end anyway. But although it may seem that no real person has to bear these burdens when they are imposed onto insurers, in reality all of society bears them collectively when insurers are forced to hike their premiums to cover these increasing damages payments. In any case, it seems unfair to force insurers to cover these costs simply because they can afford to do so. If such an expansion is indeed the cause of the PL&I crisis, then a contraction of the scope of tort liability, and a pious return to the fault principle, might remedy the situation. However it could also be argued that inadequate deterrence is the cause of this crisis. On this account the problem would lie not with the tort system’s continued unwarranted expansion, but in the fact that defendants really have been too careless. If prospective injurers were appropriately deterred from engaging in unnecessarily risky activities, then fewer accidents would ever occur in the first place, and this would reduce the need for litigation at its very source. If we take this to be the cause of tort law’s failure then our solution should aim to improve deterrence. Glen Robinson has argued that improved deterrence could be achieved if plaintiffs were allowed to sue defendants for wrongful exposure to ongoing risks of future harm, even in the absence of currently materialized losses. He argues that at least in toxic injury type cases the tortious creation of risk [should be seen as] an appropriate basis of liability, with damages being assessed according to the value of the risk, as an alternative to forcing risk victims to abide the outcome of the event and seek damages only if and when harm materializes. In a sense, Robinson wishes to treat newly-acquired wrongful risks as de-facto wrongful losses, and these are what would be compensated in liability for risk creation (‘LFRC’) cases. Robinson argues that if the extent of damages were fixed to the extent of risk exposure, all detected unreasonable risk creators would be forced to bear the costs of their activities, rather than only those who could be found responsible for another’s injuries ‘on the balance of probabilities’. The incidence of accidents should decrease as a result of improved deterrence, reduce the ‘suing fest’, and so resolve the PL&I crisis. So whilst the first solution involves contracting the scope of tort liability, Robinson’s solution involves an expansion of its scope. However Robinson acknowledges that LFRC seems prima facie incompatible with current tort principles which in the least require the presence of plaintiff losses, defendant fault, and causation to be established before making defendants liable for plaintiffs’ compensation. Since losses would be absent in LFRC cases by definition, the first evidentiary requirement would always be frustrated, and in its absence proof of defendant fault and causation would also seem scant. If such an expansion of tort liability were not supported by current tort principles then it would be no better than proposals to switch accident law across to no-fault, since both solutions would require comprehensive legal reform. However Robinson argues that the above three evidentiary requirements could be met in LFRC cases to the same extent that they are met in other currently accepted cases, and hence that his solution would therefore be preferable to no-fault solutions as it would only require incremental but not comprehensive legal reform. Although I believe that actual losses should be present before allowing plaintiffs to seek compensation, I will not present a positive argument for this conclusion. My aim in this paper is not to debate the relative merits of Robinson’s solution as compared to no-fault solutions, nor to determine which account of the cause of the PL&I crisis is closer to the truth, but rather to find out whether Robinson’s solution would indeed require less radical legal reform than, for example, proposed no-fault solutions. I will argue that Robinson fails to show that current tort principles would support his proposed solution, and hence that his solution is at best on an even footing with no-fault solutions since both would require comprehensive legal reform. (shrink)

Self-esteem can influence educational success, and educational success can also be influenced by self-esteem. Hence, high self-esteem has been recognized as a key predictor of academic success in students. Thus, this study investigates the relationship between self-esteem and anxiety of senior high school students. Employing descriptive-correlational design with 194 senior high school students enrolled in private schools during the school year 2021-2022. Based on the statistical analysis, there is a correlation between self-esteem and anxiety (r.=.125).

This thesis considers two allegations which conservatives often level at no-fault systems — namely, that responsibility is abnegated under no-fault systems, and that no-fault systems under- and over-compensate. I argue that although each of these allegations can be satisfactorily met – the responsibility allegation rests on the mistaken assumption that to properly take responsibility for our actions we must accept liability for those losses for which we are causally responsible; and the compensation allegation rests on the mistaken assumption that tort (...) law’s compensatory decisions provide a legitimate norm against which no-fault’s decisions can be compared and criticized – doing so leads in a direction which is at odds with accident law reform advocates’ typical recommendations. On my account, accident law should not just be reformed in line with no-fault’s principles, but rather it should be completely abandoned since the principles that protect no- fault systems from the conservatives’ two allegations are incompatible with retaining the category of accident law, they entail that no-fault systems are a form of social welfare and not accident law systems, and that under these systems serious deprivation – and to a lesser extent causal responsibility – should be conditions of eligibility to claim benefits. (shrink)

Egalitarians must address two questions: i. What should there be an equality of, which concerns the currency of the ‘equalisandum’; and ii. How should this thing be allocated to achieve the so-called equal distribution? A plausible initial composite answer to these two questions is that resources should be allocated in accordance with choice, because this way the resulting distribution of the said equalisandum will ‘track responsibility’ — responsibility will be tracked in the sense that only we will be responsible for (...) the resources that are available to us, since our allocation of resources will be a consequence of our own choices. But the effects of actual choices should not be preserved until the prior effects of luck in constitution and circumstance are first eliminated. For instance, people can choose badly because their choice-making capacity was compromised due to a lack of intelligence (i.e. due to constitutional bad luck), or because only bad options were open to them (i.e. due to circumstantial bad luck), and under such conditions we are not responsible for our choices. So perhaps a better composite answer to our two questions (from the perspective of tracking responsibility) might be that resources should be allocated so as to reflect people’s choices, but only once those choices have been corrected for the distorting effects of constitutional and circumstantial luck, and on this account choice preservation and luck elimination are two complementary aims of the egalitarian ideal. Nevertheless, it is one thing to say that luck’s effects should be eliminated, but quite another to figure out just how much resource redistribution would be required to achieve this outcome, and so it was precisely for this purpose that in 1981 Ronald Dworkin developed the ingenuous hypothetical insurance market argumentative device (HIMAD), which he then used in conjunction with the talent slavery (TS) argument, to arrive at an estimate of the amount of redistribution that would be required to reduce the extent of luck’s effects. However recently Daniel Markovits has cast doubt over Dworkin’s estimates of the amount of redistribution that would be required, by pointing out flaws with his understanding of how the hypothetical insurance market would function. Nevertheless, Markovits patched it up and he used this patched-up version of Dworkin’s HIMAD together with his own version of the TS argument to reach his own conservative estimate of how much redistribution there ought to be in an egalitarian society. Notably though, on Markovits’ account once the HIMAD is patched-up and properly understood, the TS argument will also allegedly show that the two aims of egalitarianism are not necessarily complementary, but rather that they can actually compete with one another. According to his own ‘equal-agent’ egalitarian theory, the aim of choice preservation is more important than the aim of luck elimination, and so he alleges that when the latter aim comes into conflict with the former aim then the latter will need to be sacrificed to ensure that people are not subordinated to one another as agents. I believe that Markovits’ critique of Dworkin is spot on, but I also think that his own positive thesis — and hence his conclusion about how much redistribution there ought to be in an egalitarian society — is flawed. Hence, this paper will begin in Section I by explaining how Dworkin uses the HIMAD and his TS argument to estimate the amount of redistribution that there ought to be in an egalitarian society — this section will be largely expository in content. Markovits’ critique of Dworkin will then be outlined in Section II, as will be his own positive thesis. My critique of Markovits, and my own positive thesis, will then make a fleeting appearance in Section III. Finally, I will conclude by rejecting both Dworkin’s and Markovits’ estimates of the amount of redistribution that there ought to be in an egalitarian society, and by reaffirming the responsibility-tracking egalitarian claim that choice preservation and luck elimination are complementary and not competing egalitarian aims. (shrink)

What constitutes illocutionary silencing? This is the key question underlying much recent work on Catherine MacKinnon's claim that pornography silences women. In what follows I argue that the focus of the literature on the notion of audience `uptake' serves to mischaracterize the phenomena. I defend a broader interpretation of what it means for an illocutionary act to succeed, and show how this broader interpretation provides a better characterization of the kinds of silencing experienced by women.

Third-party property insurance (TPPI) protects insured drivers who accidentally damage an expensive car from the threat of financial ruin. Perhaps more importantly though, TPPI also protects the victims whose losses might otherwise go uncompensated. Ought responsible drivers therefore take out TPPI? This paper begins by enumerating some reasons for why a rational person might believe that they have a moral obligation to take out TPPI. It will be argued that if what is at stake in taking responsibility is the ability (...) to compensate our possible future victims for their losses, then it might initially seem that most people should be thankful for the availability of relatively inexpensive TPPI because without it they may not have sufficient funds to do the right thing and compensate their victims in the event of an accident. But is the ability to compensate one's victims really what is at stake in taking responsibility? The second part of this paper will critically examine the arguments for the above position, and it will argue that these arguments do not support the conclusion that injurers should compensate their victims for their losses, and hence that drivers need not take out TPPI in order to be responsible. Further still, even if these arguments did support the conclusion that injurers should compensate their victims for their losses, then (perhaps surprisingly) nobody should to be allowed to take out TPPI because doing so would frustrate justice. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the political and philosophical issues pertaining to asexuality. The first section, “What Is Asexuality?,” offers an account of asexuality. The second section, “Asexuality as a Unique Sexual Orientation,” argues that asexuality should be understood as a unique sexual orientation. The third section, “Asexuality and Oppression,” discusses the various forms of oppression facing asexual persons today. The fourth section, “The Goods of Asexuality,” articulates some goods that asexuality brings to human lives, (...) and we do this with an eye toward conceiving of asexuality as something other than a mere deficit. (shrink)

The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge. By Chris Cuomo. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. The Philosopher Queen is a powerful illustration of what Cherríe Moraga calls a "theory in the flesh." That is, theorizing from a place where "physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grow up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic [and, I would add, an ethics, spirituality, and epistemology] born out of necessity" (...) (Moraga 21). Cuomo's theory in the flesh combines standard philosophical essays with personal narratives and invites us to do philosophy from this joyful and witty place. Readers are invited to reframe and reexamine war, science, gender, sexuality, race, ecology, knowledge, and politics in a voice that is fearless, funny, faithful, and feminist—one that disrupts common understandings of how philosophy ought to be done. Instead philosophy should help us to "negotiate a wild, wicked world, and to provide some understanding of being and existence. The best philosophy aims to promote good and to produce knowledge, and therefore enable flourishing" (xi). Accepted philosophical approaches alone are inadequate. Life's challenges resist formulaic solutions. Knowledge is not always produced through neat deductions: truths are partial, power divides, stomachs growl, hearts are broken, and emotions influence... (shrink)

Plato's city-soul analogy underwrites his overarching argument in the Philebus. I sketch the main lines of the analogy, and then defend it against two prominent objections.

In "Torts, Egalitarianism and Distributive Justice" , Tsachi Keren-Paz presents impressingly detailed analysis that bolsters the case in favour of incremental tort law reform. However, although this book's greatest strength is the depth of analysis offered, at the same time supporters of radical law reform proposals may interpret the complexity of the solution that is offered as conclusive proof that tort law can only take adequate account of egalitarian aims at an unacceptably high cost.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have in recent years occupied a central position in conservation and climate discussions among both scientists and policy makers. NbS generally refer to a set of strategies which use nature, or natural objects, to address societal (human) issues while simultaneously supporting the broader environment. This paper examines the concept of NbS to determine whether it is a useful and well-motivated category to guide future climate and conservation efforts. I argue that NbS may in fact be a valuable (...) contribution to environmental thought and policy, but not for the reasons that they are typically thought to be. Specifically: while we have reason to doubt that NbS should be prioritized over other environmental strategies on the grounds that they are uniquely environmentally-friendly or supportive of biodiversity, they may nevertheless have an advantage insofar as they play a vital aesthetic role in developing a healthier relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. (shrink)

Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is (...) not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible. (shrink)

Recent global efforts of the United States and England to withdraw from international institutions, along with recent challenges to human rights courts from Poland and Hungary, have been described as part of a growing global populist backlash against the liberal international order. Several scholars have even identified the recent threat of mass withdrawal of African states from the International Criminal Court (ICC) as part of this global populist backlash. Are the African challenges to the ICC part of a global populist (...) movement developing in Africa? More fundamentally, how are the African challenges to the ICC examples of populism, if at all? In this paper, I show that, while there is considerable overlap between the strategies used by particular African leaders to challenge the ICC and those typically considered populist, as well as a discernible thin populist ideology to sustain them, there is insufficient evidence of a larger anti-ICC populist movement in Africa. Although Africa is not as united against the ICC as the populist narrative suggests, the recent challenges to the Court from Africa pose a significant challenge to the Court, as the institution is still in the early stages of building its legitimacy. (shrink)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental health condition in which the experience of a traumatic event causes a series of psychiatric and behavioral symptoms such as hypervigilance, insomnia, irritability, aggression, constricted affect, and self-destructive behavior. This paper investigates two case studies to argue that the experience of PTSD is not restricted to humans alone; we have good epistemic reason to hold that some animals can experience genuine PTSD, given our current and best clinical understanding of the disorder in humans. I (...) will use this evidence to argue for two claims. First, because the causal structure of PTSD plausibly requires reference to a traumatic conscious experience in order to explain subsequent behaviors, the fact that animals can have PTSD provides new evidence for animal consciousness. Second, the discovery of PTSD in animals puts pressure on accounts which hold that animal behavior can be fully explained without reference to subjective experience. (shrink)