Controlling the names of places, environments, and species is one way in which settler colonial ontologies delimit the intelligibility of ecological relations, Indigenous peoples, and environmental injustices. To counter this, this article amplifies the voices of Native American scholars and foregrounds a philosophical account of Indigenous naming. First, I explore some central characteristics of Indigenous ontology, epistemic virtue, and ethical responsibility, setting the stage for how Native naming draws these elements together into a complete, robust philosophy. (...) Then I point toward leading but contingent principles of Native naming, foregrounding how Native names emerge from and create communities by situating (rather than individuating) the beings that they name within kinship structures, including human and nonhuman agents. Finally, I outline why and how Indigenous names and the knowledges they contain are crucial for both resisting settler violence and achieving environmental justice, not only for Native Americans, but for their entire animate communities. (shrink)

In Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes argues that one cannot trust one’s senses since they are not a reliable source of obtaining knowledge of the world. One of Descartes’s main contentions to support such an argument is from his explanation of dreams, where one can feel one is awake but instead one is dreaming. Native Americans, however, may argue that the experiences one has in dreams are real and are a source of knowledge of the real world. (...) Although Descartes uses dreams to support his argument, some Native Americans have a different take on dreams. Dreams for Native Americans are a source of knowledge as well as a source for obtaining one’s identity. Gregory Cajete, in American Indian Thought, notes that “Dreams and Visions are a natural means for accessing knowledge and establishing relationship to the world. They are encouraged and facilitated.” In other words, it is through dreams that individuals are guided, destined, and informed. Therefore, dreams as understood by some Native Americans are an extension of reality that anticipate events that will happen or can happen. The focus of this paper is an exploration of the philosophical and religious epistemology pertaining to Native Americans as described in their accounts of dreams. (shrink)

Baruch Spinoza famously said, “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God, nothing can be, or be conceived”. This form of Pantheism is quite like eastern Pantheism, where in Hinduism they assert that “everything is Brahma”, or in Taoism, where Lao Tzu says, “Heaven and I were created together, and all things and I are one”. Although the western and eastern world shared their respective ideas of Pantheism, Native Americans also contributed to such discussion. However, comparative philosophy between (...) western and Native American philosophy has been far neglected, and the same neglect has been shown regarding Native American contribution to Pantheism. Many Indigenous religions believe that there is a Great Spirit that is manifested as a life force or energy that communicates and speaks through nature. In other words, some Native American tribes believe that nature, or in extension the universe, is part of a Great Spirit that communicates to individuals in a naturalistic way. Such a Great Spirit created the world and is in everything that the Great Spirit created. Moreover, there are other Indigenous beliefs that not only hold a Pantheistic view but hold a Panentheistic perspective where God is a being that is present in creation but transcends from it. Therefore, although Indigenous beliefs about Pantheism or Panentheism have been much neglected, there is much to say about it. With such input from Native American religious culture, this paper seeks to show and compare Spinoza’s Pantheism and that of Native Americans. In addition, I wish to investigate in what ways Native American philosophy contributes to the discussion of cosmology, nature, and Pantheism. In particular, how do some Native American tribes understand God in a Pantheistic sense where nature and cosmology are one. (shrink)

"This book presents a theoretical discussion of problems and issues encountered in the Native American community from a perspective that accepts Native knowledge as legitimate. Native American cosmology and metaphor are used extensively in order to deal with specific problems such as alcoholism, suicide, family, and community problems. The authors discuss what it means to present material from the perspective of a people who have legitimate ways of knowing and conceptualizing reality and show that it (...) is imperative to understand intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression in order to understand the issues facing Native Americans today."--pub. website. (shrink)

An account of the specific ill of Native American mascots—that is, the particular racism of using Native Americans as mascots, as distinct from other racist portrayals of Native Americans—requires a fuller account of the function of mascots as such than has previously been offered. By analyzing the history of mascots in the United States, this article argues that mascots function as symbols that draw into an artificial unity 1) a variety of teams existing over a period (...) of time and thereby 2) a community of individuals who are thus able to use that team as their own symbolic locus of unification.This unification of teams and their concomitant communities is accomplished by appeal to a symbol that facilitates a particular fantasy of collective identity. The usage of Native American mascots is racist not only because it involves stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans, but (more specifically) because it treats Native persons simply as a means to symbolic unification—and not, importantly, as members of the community they thus serve. In other words, in these cases mascots work as unifying signifiers precisely by being the purely instrumental facilitator of a group's collective fantasy of itself. (shrink)

In this note, my aim is to point out a phenomenon that has not received much attention; a phenomenon that, in my opinion, should not be overlooked in the professional practice of philosophy, especially within feminist efforts for social justice. I am referring to the way in which being a non-native speaker of English interacts with the practice of philosophy.1 There is evidence that non-native speakers are often perceived in prejudiced ways. Such prejudiced perception causes harm (...) and, more importantly, constitutes wrongdoing. As in other cases of prejudiced perception and biased behavior, it would be pretentious and misguided to expect philosophers and the philosophy profession to be free from this vice. There are good reasons to think that this prejudiced perception is bad not only for the persons who are perceived in such a way, but also for the profession, for it might make us miss important things that could improve philosophy in general. I claim we should be more sensitive to this phenomenon, both out of concern for justice, and for the sake of doing better philosophy. (shrink)

Racism in the USA not only takes place in law, economics, politics, mass media and new media, education, literature, and popular culture but also occurs in philosophy. An abundance of Latino philosophers, African-American philosophers, and Native American philosophers are excluded from the American philosophy canon. To discover whether racism happens in the field of American philosophy, the writer surveys 15 American philosophy books written between the 1940s and the 2020s by (...) various American writers, the whites and the non-whites. The writer carries out an ‗index-study‘: scanning philosopher names in the index of each book, identifying and scrutinizing the names, listing and categorizing them into race categories, counting them, comparing the number of non-white philosophers and white philosophers mentioned in each book, putting them in a table, and interpreting why there is a disparity between the number of non-white and white philosophers included in the books. The survey result shows that racism happens in American philosophy; the writers of the 15 American philosophy books exclude an abundance of non-white philosophers. There is a critical need to write a new, post-national American philosophy book that does justice to non-white philosophers in the near future so that racism diminishes. (shrink)

American Indian Thought is a contemporary collection of twenty-two essays written by Indigenous persons with Western philosophical training, all attempting to formulate, and/or contribute to a sub-discipline of, a Native American Philosophy. The contributors come from diverse tribal, educational, philosophical, methodological, etc., backgrounds, and there is some tension among aspects of the collection, but what is more striking is the harmony and the singularity of the collection’s intent. Part of this singularity may derive from the solidarity (...) among its authors. In addition to the fact that all belong to Indigenous tribes, there is also a striking sensitivity to the interconnection between distinct Western disciplines—particularly between philosophy and poetry. I take the latter to be a thread which can be strategically woven into the center of the anthology’s weave. In this book discussion, I aim to draw out the poetic aspects of five of the anthology’s essays, which deal with philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, respectively. In this way, I hope to illuminate a poetic quality at the heart of the collection, and thus also of the burgeoning field of Native American or Indigenous philosophy in general. In the process, I will also consider ways in which Indigenous philosophy resonates with the Western philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism. With the latter tradition in particular this connection has become more fully appreciated, especially through the work of Bruce Wilshire and Scott Pratt. (shrink)

Philosophy’s place, at the intersection of the scientific and humanities disciplines, makes it an interesting test case for the role of English and other languages and cultures in our contemporary knowledge economy. The humanities’ attention to the richness of the world’s languages and cultures is in tension with the science’s essentially cosmopolitan project. This tension is perhaps especially evident in ‘analytic’ or ‘Anglo-American’ philosophy. Despite complementarity in earlier stages of the discipline, the humanities and scientific tendencies are (...) now clashing with undesirable results. This is in an important part due to analytic philosophy’s underexamined focus on a single vehicular language. One symptom of this malaise is that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are significantly less heard than those of native speakers. Especially problematic is, I argue, the current emphasis given to aesthetic considerations, and in particular linguistic form or style, as a sign of scientific rigour in the analysis of philosophical problems. I discuss this emphasis critically, arguing that it is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives arising from different languages and cultures. I conclude by briefly presenting a recent attempt to make contemporary philosophy more linguistically inclusive. (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have (...) done so much to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

The Caribbean is a site where multiple cultures, peoples, waysof thinking and acting have come together and where new formsof philosophy are emerging. The promise of Caribbean philoso-phy lays in its ability to give shape to an intellectual tradition which is both true to and beneficial to Caribbean peoples whilesimultaneously being provocative enough to engage wisdom-seekers of various geographies and identities. I argue that onlyby pursuing a “New Dialogic” which engages the philosophicaltraditions of Africans, African Americans, and Native (...) Ameri-cans can we hope to assert a unique philosophy of value toCaribbean peoples and cultures. The highest form of Caribbeanphilosophy thus must be plural and dialogical. Unfortunately,dialogues in philosophy have been typically characterized bya fixation with Europe, and a lack of consideration of otherphilosophical traditions or sources. The “New Dialogic” thatI propose here involves a more dynamic model of dialogue toopen or intensify different and multiple avenues of conceptualelaboration. I provide general guidelines or principles for this“New Dialogic” and demonstrate the extent to which Caribbeanphilosophers can both contribute to the expansion of this projectand be aided by it in their formulations of the field. (shrink)

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William (...) Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Question of Whether There Is a Latin American Philosophy Is There Philosophy in Latin America? References Further Reading.

In this chapter, I argue that John Rawls’ later work presents one of the most fruitful liberal frameworks from which to approach global cultural diversity. In his Law of Peoples (1999), the normative architecture Rawls provides is much more open to an intercultural/religious dialogue with various non-Western communities, such as the First Nations, than are other liberal approaches. Surprisingly, this has gone unnoticed in the literature on multiculturalism. At the same time, Rawls’ framework is not problem free. Here, I am (...) concerned with Rawls’ conception of overlapping consensus as political, rather than comprehensive; or the idea that dialogue and discussion concerning issues of justice must necessarily, as a matter of principle, exclude philosophical or religious reasons. I argue that this constraint will only add to the unfair exclusion of legitimate concerns. I demonstrate this in Rawls' discussion of so-called non-public spiritual perspectives of land, non-human animals, and the environment – views strikingly similar to those held by many Indigenous and Native Americans. Rawls’ framework unjustifiably and unjustly excludes such views from participation in the public and political realm. In the context of a globally diverse world, and in light of a history of Western colonialism, oppression, and domination of Indigenous peoples, I would argue that justice and fairness require that such others at least be able to articulate their concerns in the public and political domain, according to their own self-understandings and as they see fit, even if we do not agree with these. I argue that Rawls’ proviso is insufficient as a response. (shrink)

This encyclopedia article outlines the history of Latin American philosophy: the thinking of its indigenous peoples, the debates over conquest and colonization, the arguments for national independence in the eighteenth century, the challenges of nation-building and modernization in the nineteenth century, the concerns over various forms of development in the twentieth century, and the diverse interests in Latin American philosophy during the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than attempt to provide an exhaustive and impossibly (...) long list of scholars’ names and dates, this article outlines the history of Latin American philosophy while trying to provide a meaningful sense of detail by focusing briefly on individual thinkers whose work points to broader philosophical trends that are inevitably more complex and diverse than any encyclopedic treatment can hope to capture. (shrink)

This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant during the first three decades of the (...) century. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, however, the middle third of the century witnessed the rising influence in America of what would become known as “‘analytic philosophy’,” with its primary roots in Europe: in the Cambridge philosophical analysis of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein; logical empiricism and positivism on the continent; and linguistic analysis and ordinary- language philosophy at Oxford. This overview stresses the persistence of pragmatist themes throughout much of the century, while emphasizing the mid-century transformations that resulted from developments primarily in analytic philosophy. These combined influences resulted at the turn of the millennium in the flourishing, among other developments, of distinctively analytic styles of pragmatism and naturalism. (shrink)

Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the road to perfection must be (...) paved through industry, a condition that Kant denies to the “savages” by racializing their alleged laziness. This case will shed new light on the debated relation between Kant’s moral universalism and his racism. (shrink)

Some students who possess the same cognitive skill set as their counterparts but who neither speak nor write English fluently have to contend with an unnecessary barrier to academic success. While an administrative top-down approach has been in progress for many years to address this issue, enhancement of student performance begins in the classroom. Thus, we argue that instructors ought to implement a more organic bottom-up approach. If it is possible for instructors to make class content available in other languages, (...) such as Spanish, without thereby compromising something of comparable pedagogical value, then they ought to do so. In fact, we provide here Anselm’s Ontological Argument rendered in Spanish to show how, when translated, it provides native Spanish speakers with greater accessibility to difficult material. Then, we consider the possible beneficial implications of doing so for university students. (shrink)

This book provides a historical and theoretical analysis of the Ayotzinapa social movement from the perspective of Latin American philosophy. The author addresses questions such as how a social movement is born, how (and if) the distinct social movement organizations should be defined, and what (if any) should be the extent of these organizations.

George Sword an Oglala Lakota (1846–1914) learned to write in order to transcribe and preserve his people’s oral narratives. In her book Delphine Red Shirt, also Oglala Lakota and a native speaker, examines the compositional processes of George Sword and shows how his writings reflect recurring themes and story patterns of the Lakota oral tradition. Her book invites further studies in several areas including literature, translation studies and more. My review of her book suggests some ways it could be (...) used as a primary resource book in developing curricula in Indigenous philosophy . (shrink)

Octavio Paz conceives of authentic philosophical reflection as ‘thinking a la intemperie’. This conception involves his idea that our contemporary historical and philosophical situation is one of intemperie espiritual. Based on the dual sense of the term intemperie for Paz, I propose that ‘thinking a la intemperie’ means: (i) Exposing our beliefs to the weathering effects of our vital, concrete experience; and (ii) apprehending reality in communion with others through poetic experience of the ever-flowing present. That is, authentic philosophical reflection (...) means making our home thinking and living without rigid, stifling ideological systems, in communion with our neighbors and with our places, here and now, in the unity of present place and present time that we create together. This mode of reflection belongs within a broad American tradition of philosophizing and, for Paz, responds to concerns compatible with those of the pragmatists. (shrink)

This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We argue that Anzaldúa effectively contributed to la filosofía de lo mexicano by developing an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness. More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin (...) class='Hi'>American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we examine and discuss here are: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (shrink)

This essay suggests that the U.S.-American Pragmatist tradition could be fruitfully reconstructed by way of a dialogue with Latin American Liberation Philosophy. More specifically, I work to establish a common ground for future comparative work by: 1) gathering and interpreting Enrique Dussel’s scattered comments on Pragmatism, 2) showing how the concept of liberation already functions in John Dewey’s Pragmatism, and 3) suggesting reasons for further developing this inter-American philosophical dialogue and debate.

The field of Latin American philosophy has established itself as a relevant subfield of philosophical inquiry. However, there might be good reasons to consider that our focus on the subfield could have distracted us from considering another subfield that, although it might share some geographical proximity, does not share the same historical basic elements. In this paper, I argue for a possible and meaningful conceptual difference between Latin American Philosophy and Indigenous philosophy produced in Latin (...) America. First, I raise what I call Mariátegui’s Solidarity Challenge to show that there might be some neglectful treatment of the philosophical views of different Indigenous groups. I then depart from Mariátegui and engage in a critical exercise to show that even he would be guilty of failing in his own solidarity demands. I follow that by drawing out some implications of the argument. I first sketch how this differentiation would play out against the political project of “Mestizaje,” a project that seems to inform some of the Latin American philosophical tradition. I then speculate about the kinds of duties that the field of Latin American philosophy might have towards the field of Indigenous Philosophy produced in Latin America. (shrink)

the two-and-a-half years that Dewey lived in Japan and China offered him an East-West comparative standpoint to examine Euro-American presuppositions. In subsequent work, he took steps in the direction of a global philosophical outlook by promoting a fusion of aesthetic refinements with democratic experimentalism. The year 2021 marks the centennial of Dewey’s return to the United States, yet philosophers in this country have only begun to take in an emerging global philosophical scene that includes unfamiliar questions, angles, idioms, and (...) emphases. This includes American pragmatists. In a sense, as Gregory Pappas has observed in the context of Latin American philosophies, pragmatism did not “grow up” in the United... (shrink)

It has been said that all philosophy begins with a set of concerns and a set of intuitions. With this idea in mind, we ask: Would it be helpful to understand Mexican-American philosophy as a kind of philosophy that begins with the concerns and intuitions of the Mexican-American community? On this view, what distinguishes Mexican-American philosophy is the orientation from which the philosophical investigation proceeds. Such an orientation is shaped by the experiences and (...) relationships that are characteristic of those who identify as Mexican-American. We offer a list of concerns and intuitions that we suggest are widely held by the Mexican-American community. Focusing on questions surrounding linguistic assimilation in the U.S., we illustrate how beginning from these particular starting points might alter the way we think about philosophical issues. (shrink)

This article describes my ongoing attempts to more successfully engage the full linguistic repertoires and cultural identities of undergraduate students at a “Hispanic Serving Institution” (HSI) in South Texas by teaching a bilingual Introduction to Latin American Philosophy course in the “Language, Philosophy, and Culture” area of Texas’ General Education Core Curriculum. By uncovering the diverse identities, worldviews, and languages of those who were historically excluded from the Eurocentric discipline of philosophy through the conquest and colonization (...) of the Americas, Latin American philosophers offer us new ways of thinking and living by challenging Anglocentric language, philosophy, and culture. As part of the new B3 (Bilingual, Bicultural, and Biliterate) vision of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the course is designed to draw upon the richly varied bilingualisms and biliteracies of predominantly Latinx students in order to help them honor, theorize, and cultivate their bicultural identities by “philosophizing in tongues” rather than being forced to assimilate to the monolingual and monocultural ideology that prevails across both mainstream Anglophone philosophy and the system of higher education in the United States of America. (shrink)

Historians have shown that philosophical discussions about the implications of relativity significantly shaped the development of European philosophy of science in the 1920s. Yet little is known about American debates from this period. This paper maps the first responses to Einstein’s theory in three U.S. philosophy journals and situates these papers within the local intellectual climate. We argue that these discussions (1) stimulated the development of a distinctly American branch of philosophy of science and (2) (...) paved the way for the logical empiricists, who emigrated to the United States in the years before World War II. (shrink)

This article describes why I used to teach Introduction to Latin American Philosophy monolingually in English, why I stopped, and how I am now teaching it using a flexible bilingual pedagogy, also sometimes called a translanguaging pedagogy, that has been transformative for my students and for me. By drawing upon the ventajas/assets y conocimientos/knowledge of our richly varied bilingualisms and biliteracies, the revised course contributes to the B3 (bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate) vision of the University of Texas Rio (...) Grande Valley (UTRGV). Students have the opportunity to honor, theorize, and cultivate their bicultural identities by “philosophizing in tongues” rather than being forced to assimilate to the monolingual and monocultural ideology that prevails across both mainstream Anglophone philosophy and the system of higher education in the United States of America. (shrink)

Since at least 2008 linguists and philosophers of language have started paying more serious attention to issues concerning the meaning or use of racial epithets and slurs. In an influential article published in The Journal of Philosophy, for instance, Christopher Hom (2008) offered a semantic account of racial epithets called Combinatorial Externalism (CE) that advanced a novel argument for the exclusion of certain epithets from freedom of speech protection under the First Amendment (p. 435). Also in more recent work, (...) “The Expressive Meaning of Racial Epithets: Towards A Non-Unitary Account of Expressive Meaning,” Diane Blakemore (2013) offered an alternative pragmatic account of racial epithets rooted in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory. Adam Croom (2008) has also discussed epithets before in prior work, through a consideration of a paradigmatic racial epithet directed towards Native Americans, but then moved on in subsequent work to focus on developing a more nuanced account of paradigmatic slurring terms instead (Croom 2010; Croom 2011; Croom 2012; Croom 2013; Croom 2014a; Croom 2014b; Croom under review). So the purpose of this article is to return to and extend the previous account of racial epithets provided by Croom (2008) through a consideration of another paradigmatic racial epithet, but this time one directed towards Asian Americans instead of Native Americans. Here I also offer a novel suggestion for how to differentiate between epithets and slurs, offering new insight into how epithets and slurs are both similar and different. A sample list of over 100 other racial epithets that can be accounted for by the kind of analysis presented here is provided in Croom (2008, p. 44-45). (shrink)

This volume contains the most extensive exposition of Latin American philosophy to date. I know of no other comparable anthology on the subject in any language. The width of its scope is quite impressive. At least for this reason, and whatever its shortcomings might be (to some of them I’ll come to speak below), it is a welcome collective work.

In the United States, Protestant Christian identity is the dominant religious identity. Protestant Christian identity confers status privileges, yet also creates objectionable status inequalities. Historical and contemporary evidence includes the unfair treatment of Mormons, Native Americans, Muslims, and other religious minorities. Protestant Christian supremacy also plays a significant role in bolstering anti LGBTQ prejudice, xenophobia, and white supremacy. Ways that Protestant Christian identity correlates with objectionable status inequalities are often neglected in contemporary political philosophy. This paper aims to (...) make a modest contribution towards filling that gap. Some forms of inequality linked to Protestant Christian supremacy can be characterized as domination and oppression. Other instances include barriers to fair equality of opportunity for self-determination. Adapting ideas from egalitarian political philosophy I propose an analysis of objectionable status inequality rooted in Protestant Christian supremacy. Alan Patten’s defense of an egalitarian principle for assessing the effects of law and policy is helpful for this task. (shrink)

Recent work in philosophy of race involves Native American, Africana, and Latin American critiques of the sociohistorical specificity underlying allegedly universalist moral and political philosophy in the U.S. and the West generally. Joining the discussion, this essay explores American orientalism in terms of the imperialist expansion of the U.S. across the Pacific since the late 19th century. Toward this end, Hawai'i, Guam, and thereby the U.S. itself are conceptualized as geopolitical gestalts. No full story (...) of the Rawlsian basic structure of 20th-century America will be complete without attention to the dynamics of U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific. (shrink)

This text intends on putting what may be called a philosophy of marronage1 in conversation with Indigenous thought, particularly by engaging with the thought of Cherokee Nation philosopher Brian Burkhart from his essay “Locality is a Metaphysical Fact.”2 While the topic is treated in detail in Burkhart’s Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land (2019), my engagement with that specific text will be reserved for a separate project. What is of interest to me here is Burkhart’s elaboration of the concept (...) of locality, which refers to an “ontological kinship with the land” that serves as a bulwark against the sedimentation of the coloniality of being in the ontology of the Indigenous subject. I would like to add some nuance to it from the positionality of a subject whose ontological kinship with the land was severed through the kidnapping and enslavement of the ancestors from the African continent. In the process, my intent is to offer an alternate reading of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) which may allow Fanonian thought to be reconciled with North Native American Indigenous thought, which has typically rejected Fanon’s rejection of a return to ancestral ways. This alternate reading of Fanon shows that a reconnection with ancestral ways, and reconstruction of locality, constitutes only part of the liberation project for Afro-diasporic subjects. (shrink)

About death, grief, mourning, life after death and immortality. Why should we die like humans to survive as a species. -/- "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears (...) out the old to make way for the new." (Steve Jobs) -/- CONTENTS: -/- Death - Philosophy of death - Religions - - Animism - - Atheism - - Buddhism - - Christianity - - Hinduism - - Islam - - Jainism - - Jehovah's Witnesses - - Judaism - - Latter-day Saints - - Spiritism - Symbolism - Personification of Death - - Notable personifications - - In mythologies - - - Hindu mythology - - - In Japan - - - Slavic paganism - - - Lithuanian paganism - - In the three monotheistic religions - - - Judaism - - - Christianity - - - In Mexico - - - Islam - Axiochos - - The characters of dialogue - - Dialogue - - Prologue - - Arguments - - Citations - Paradise - - Greco-Roman mythology - - Mesopotamian mythology and influences - - According to Judaism - - According to Christianity - - - According to Catholicism - - - According to Protestantism - - - According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - - According to Islam - - According to Hinduism - - According to modern spiritualities - - - According to the esoteric - Hell - - Mesopotamian origins - - According to Christianity - - - Names appearing in the biblical texts - - - Medieval artistic representations - - - Concepts according to Christian movements - - According to Judaism - - According to Islam - - According to Buddhism - - According to Hinduism - - According to modern esotericism - - - According to Aïvanhov - - - According to Allan Kardec - - Philosophy - - - Jewish Kabbalah - - - Sartre - - - Popular wisdom Funerals - The funeral ritual: a rite of passage - Prehistory - Ancient death customs - - The family bereavement - - Mummification - - Sarcophagi - - Funerals - - Ancient Greece - - Ancient Rome - - Celts, Germans and Scandinavians - Religious funeral rites - - Buddhism - - Judaism - Christianity - - Protestantism - - Islam - Funeral rites by continent - - In Africa - - In Europe - The contemporary era - Mourning (Grief) - - Steps - - - Death of a close - - Loss events without mourning value (white factors) - - Duration and manifestations - - Risks - - Colors - Graveyards (Cemeteries) - - First cemeteries - - Cemeteries today - Funerary art - Dolmens - - Types of dolmens - - Function - - Location - Passage graves - Cenotaphs - - Famous cenotaphs - Lanterns of the Dead Afterlife - History - Questions about death and immortality - Testimonials - - Spiritualistic experiences - - Popular literature on the afterlife - - "Memories" and reminiscences - - Early studies of the science of the 19th century and early 20th century - Types of scenarios - Some religious and philosophical concepts - - Afterlife in Buddhism - - Afterlife in Christianity - - According to Hinduism - - According to Islam - - According to Judaism - - According to Mormonism - - According to the ancient philosophies - - According to Spiritism - - According to Native American traditions - - According to Vedism - - According to Esotericism - In science - Near-death experiences - - Clinical death - - NDE frequency - - Effects of depth of NDE on survival - - Near-death experiences and shared-death experience - - - The first contemporary testimonials - - - Experience according to Moody - - - The concept of "shared death" - - - The NDE scales - - The study of Pim van Lommel - - Spiritual and patient point of view - - - Survivalists studies - - - The religious understanding of the phenomenon - - Scientific views - - - Physiological explanation - - - Psychological explanation - Reincarnation - - Religions - - - In Hinduism - - - In Jainism - - - In Buddhism - - - In Judaism - - - In Christianity - - - In Islam - - In contemporary times - - - Esotericism - - - Works of the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson - - - Radical increase in life expectancy and artificial reincarnation - - Criticism - - - Arthur Schopenhauer - - - Ramana Maharshi - - - Rene Guenon - - - Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy - Metempsychosis - - Theories - - Ideas - Maschalismos Immortality - Immortality of the soul and religious traditions - - Buddhism - - Christianity - - Islam - - Mormonism - Contemporary perception of the immortality of the body - - Observation in the animal kingdom - - Perspectives for mankind - Immortality in science - - Alexis Carrel - - Jean Rostand - - Hayflick limit - - Étienne-Émile Baulieu and DHEA - - Aubrey de Grey - - Professor Skulachev - - Regenerative medicine - - Professor Christopher Jaeger - Eternal Return - - According to the Mesopotamians - - According to Heraclitus and the Stoics - Fountain of Youth - - History of myth and relatives myths - - - In Roman mythology, Germanic, Celtic and Irish - - - In the Middle-East - - - In Spain - - - In the Bible - - The fountain in art and literature - - Painting - - - Literature and cinema - - Persistent of the myth until today - Senescence - - Why do we age? - - Gene regulation - - Cellular senescence Undead - Ghoul - Lich - Mummy - Skeleton - Vampire - Zombie - Other legendary creatures - Creatures specific to a particular universe - Spiritism - - Point out - - Origins of spiritism - - - The traditions through the ages - - - Advent of Christianity in Europe - - - The survival of necromancy - - - The precursors - - - Relations of spiritualism to science - Mediumship - - History - - Skeptical point of view - - Favorable doctor's viewpoint - Ghosts - - Appearance - - Belief in ghosts - - Origin - - - Duality and return dead - - - Ancient roots - - Typology - - - Poltergeists - - - Revenants - - - Ghosts - - - Banshees - - - Apparitions of crisis - - - Phantasms of the living - - - Vision of his own double - - - Ghost armies - - - Ghosts of animals - - - Means of transport - - Science perspective - - - Hallucinations - - - Sleep paralysis - - - Induced ghosts - - - Aches and infrasounds - - - Magnetic fields - Vampires - - Characteristics - - - Vampire transformation - - - Identification - - - Faculties - - Protection against the vampires - - - Precautions at death and burial - - - Apotropaic objects and places - - Destruction of vampires - Zombie - - The concept - - Africa and voodoo - - - West Africa - - - South Africa - - - In Haiti (and the Caribbean) - - - Scientific research - - The "revenants" in the Western imaginary Death in art - Memento mori - - History - - - Antiquity - - - Christianity - - - Mexican syncretism - - Performing arts - - - In painting - - - In literature - - - In movies - - - In video games - - - In Japanese animation - - - In music - The iconography of Weighing of souls (Particular judgment) - - Origin - - Written sources - - Weighing in Romanesque art - - Weighing in Gothic art - - Weighing in the late Middle Ages: to a new iconography - - Weighing of souls or actions? - Poems - - Charlotte Brontë, “On the Death of Anne Brontë” - - Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee” - - Edna St. Vincent Millay, “And you as well must die” - - Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death” - - Emily Dickinson, “If I Should Die” - - Lord Byron, “Epitaph to a Dog” - - Pablo Neruda, “Only Death” - - Stephen Crane, “God Lay Dead in Heaven” - - W. B. Yeats, “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead” - - Rainer Maria Rilke, “Death” - Paintings - - The Three Dead Kings - - The Death of Nelson - - Beata Beatrix - Sculptures - - The Kiss of Death - - Background - - Imagery - - Angel of Grief - - Fallen Astronaut - Quotes References About the author - Nicolae Sfetcu - - By the same author - - Contact Publishing House - MultiMedia Publishing -/- DOI: 10.58679/TW44411. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in (...) part due to its effective promotion by The Philosophical Review’s editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Some of the central questions that have been explored by Latin American and Latinx philosophers are questions of metaphilosophy. "Metaphilosophy" refers to philosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy itself. For example, we might ask: What is the purpose of doing philosophy? How does philosophy compare and contrast with other disciplines, such as science, theology, or literature? And what is the best way of categorizing the different kinds and traditions of philosophy? These are philosophical questions (...) about philosophy as an activity and as a discipline. In this chapter, we discuss some ways that Latin American and Latinx philosophers have addressed these and other metaphilosophical issues. Our focus will be on the following questions: What are the defining characteristics of Latin American philosophy and Latinx philosophy? Do they constitute distinctive traditions of philosophy, and if so, what is especially valuable about these traditions? (shrink)

Susanne K. Langer is best known as a philosopher of culture and student of Ernst Cassirer. In this chapter, however, I argue that this standard picture ignores her contributions to the development of analytic philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. I reconstruct the reception of Langer’s first book *The Practice of Philosophy*—arguably the first sustained defense of analytic philosophy by an American philosopher—and describe how prominent European philosophers of science such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and (...) Herbert Feigl viewed her as one of the most important allies in the United States. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to Langer’s best-selling *Philosophy in a New Key* and reconstruct her attempts to broaden the scope of the, by then, rapidly growing U.S. analytic movement. I argue that her book anticipated various developments in analytic philosophy but was largely ignored by her former colleagues. I end the chapter by offering some clues as to why New Key did not incite the same laudatory responses from analytic philosophers as her earlier work. (shrink)

This is a greatly expanded version of my article "Anarchism and the Beats," which was published in the book, The Philosophy of the Beats, by the University Press of Kentucky in 2012. It is both an historical and a philosophical analysis of the postwar American counterculture. It charts the historical origins of the postwar American counterculture from the anarchists and romantic poets of the early nineteenth century to a complex network of beat poets and pacifist anarchists in (...) the early decades after World War II. The beat poets understood themselves to be religious prophets of a new form of liberated consciousness. Poetry was both a means to achieve this new form of consciousness and a means to express that consciousness once it was achieved by other means including travel, psychedelic drugs, sex or meditation. The transformation of consciousness sought by the beats was therefore primarily religious in nature, not political or ideological. However, that does not mean that the beats believed that the transformation of consciousness they sought had no political or social implications. On the contrary, the beats were almost all anarchists. It merely means that, for them, political ideology follows consciousness, not the reverse. (shrink)

The article aims at clarifying the historical status and cognitive potentials of such a genre of contemporary historiography of philosophy as biographical encyclopedia (dictionary). Based on extensive bibliographic material, the author demonstrates that in the late XX – early XXI centuries in the English-speaking countries there was a real outbreak of interest in encyclopedias and dictionaries, compiled from personalized articles about the life and works of philosophers of certain epochs, countries, trends, etc. According to the author, the increasing popularity (...) of this genre can be considered as a logical continuation of the historical and biographical turns that took place in the Anglo-American (analytic) philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The author specifically emphasizes that it caused the appearance of a significant number of encyclopedias and dictionaries, which contain the well-known facts as well as the significant elements of scholar novelty. The article also shows that similar tendencies have taken place in the contemporary Ukrainian historiography of philosophy. It is shown that Ukrainian experts also made their own significant contribution to the development of this genre. They have successfully developed a special approach, which presupposes the focus on life and works of the representatives of a particular academic institution. The intellectual value of this approach is demonstrated by the example of the recently published two-volume encyclopedia “Kyiv Theological Academy in Names: 1819-1924”. It contains a systematic and very informative presentation of the biographies of many representatives of the national philosophy, whose activities were associated with this institution. The author also shows that from the perspective of the historiography of philosophy, the general methodological foundations of this encyclopedic research is a matter of special interest. (shrink)

The controversy over the possibility of an indigenous Latin American Philosophy might be understood as dealing with an older question about the nature of philosophy itself: Is the nature of philosophy purely speculative, practical, or both? For the sake of argument, I am using the term “Latin American Philosophy” in a normative sense as referring to social and political philosophy written by Latin Americans to change oppressive conditions and policies affecting their societies. I (...) am assuming that liberation philosophers fall under the above description. Unlike liberationists, I argue that universalist philosophers can present illuminating and hence persuasive arguments for their position. Of course, liberationists might argue that I am begging the question. But if they could successfully demonstrate that I am doing so, they would be compelled to appeal to at least some nonarbitrary principle of adjudication. If they were to do so, they would be supporting rather than undermining my argument in favor of a universalist conception of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, (...) the Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)

More than thirty-five years after its first release in 1971, Don McLean’s “American Pie” still resonates deeply with music listeners and consumers of popular culture. In a 2001 public poll sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America, McLean’s eight-and-a-half-minute masterpiece was ranked number 5 among the 365 “most memorable” songs of the twentieth century. In 2002, the song was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1997, Garth brooks performed “ (...) class='Hi'>American Pie” at a concert in Central Park, and in 2000, pop icon Madonna performed her own version of “American Pie” on the soundtrack of her movie The Next Best Thing. In 1999, American Pie became the title of a popular – and irreverently comical – coming-of-age movie starring Jason Biggs (the movie American Pie was followed by American Pie 2 in 2001, American Wedding in 2003, and American Pie Present – Band Camp in 2005). Like the movie to which it lent its name, the song “American Pie” presents a coming-of-age narrative; and, also like the movie, the song appealed strongly and immediately to its contemporary audience. Three months after its release in November of 1971, the song reached the number one slot on the charts in January of 1972, and it remained in the Top 40 for a total of seventeen weeks (longer than any other single during the year of 1972). Unlike the movie, however, the song “American Pie” is highly nuanced and sophisticated, containing multiple allusions and layers of meaning which challenge and heighten our understanding of rock ’n’ roll music and the possibility of self-reflection and self-critique in popular culture. (shrink)