Palestinian rock climbers in the West Bank ascend towering limestone cliffs despite being forcibly dispossessed and targeted by Israeli military and violent settlers. This paper examines their actions from the perspective of Quiet Resistance – a form of resistance where one is motivated by personal reasons to pursue activities that are obstructed by oppression. I explain what Quiet Resistance is, how it differs from political protest, and what makes it distinctively valuable. Then, I explain how (...) Quiet Resistance allows the Palestinian climbers to maintain sources of meaning in life under oppressive circumstances. Further, as a form of symbolic action, it allows the climbers to forge a profound connection to their rightful land. (shrink)

Jennifer Windt’s Dreaming is an enormously rich and thorough book, developing illuminating connections between dreaming, the methodology of psychology, and various philosophical subfields. I’ll focus on two epistemological threads that run through the book. The first has to do with the status of certain assumptions about dreams. Windt argues that the assumptions that dreams involve experiences, and that dream reports are reliable — are methodologically necessary default assumptions, akin to Wittgensteinian hinge propositions. I’ll suggest that Windt is quietly pre-supposing some (...) sceptical assumptions, and that recent literature in epistemic externalism may bear in important ways on her arguments. The second thread involves the perennial sceptical worry that dreaming threatens ordinary knowledge. I’ll suggest again that Windt makes tacit sceptical assumptions one may wish to resist. (shrink)

Prior to this intervention the site used to be a degraded fiscal property, that functioned as a bus yard, a police legal deposit, and a restaurant parking lot. Underneath it runs the Maldonado stream culvert, covered by a concrete slab at a depth of only -20cm. Next to the site is a 5m high railroad embankment. The plot is strategically located at the end of Juan B. Justo avenue and works as a gateway to the Tres de Febrero park (also (...) known as Bosques de Palermo, the Buenos Aires’s biggest green space designed by Charles Thays in 1875). It is situated in the neighborhood of Palermo, an area that underwent a vertiginous residential and commercial expansion since the late 90´s. -/- The design approach is influenced by the adjacent urban fragments: the grounds of the Sociedad Rural Argentina, the surrounding Avenues Santa Fe-Sarmiento; the opening of Darregueyra street expected for the near future, the implementation of historic preservation guidelines for the Tres de Febrero Park, and the proposal for the development of nearby railroad yards. -/- Specifically, the project seeks to minimize the impact of the fast traffic that runs along Bullrich avenue, improving pedestrian and cycle access to the park. At the same time it defines new landscape features, utilizing the earth made available by the tunneling works of a new subway line. -/- The project comprises the structuring of an existing 800 meter long embankment and the transformation of the sidewalk into a public promenade. This is achieved through a wider sidewalk of 12m on average, which is part of a series of longitudinal stripes ranging from high speed to quiet spaces. The first band of grass and aged tipas (tipuana tipu) buffer pedestrian and cyclist from automotive traffic. Cycle traffic is organized on its own lane. The sidewalk itself contains several bays that act as urban lounges. Next, a continuous concrete bench delimits the beginning of the slope, backed by a stripe of grass that works as a soft extension. Finally, plants for contemplation are arranged as undulating traces. Rhythmic use of retaining gabions defines longitudinal segments of varying slope, unifying the spacial criterion. This series is punctuated by an amphitheater and framed by triangular plazas at the corners. -/- Material choices for hard surfaces are constrained by concerns of durability, low cost, and consistency with other ongoing public works. -/- Hard materials, as well as the plant selection needed to be low-maintenance. The palette was kept to reinforced concrete, granitic slabs, and granite stone in large size –forming retaining gabions- and as loose finishing for pavements. Likewise, the lack of a protective enclosure and of continuous surveillance dictated that urban furniture and fixtures be anti-vandalic. The stealing of these components –from inspection lids, to benches, to plants- is a common problem in urban spaces in many Latin American cities. To prevent this, fixtures must be designed according to precise specifications regarding their weight, fixing and anchoring systems, and mechanical parts. -/- Sidewalks are organized through a 6 meter grid made of granitic white slab, infilled with textured combed nonslip concrete modules. Extended bays and corner squares are finished with white and black slabs respectively. These materials are similar to another used in public spaces under construction, in the believe that it creates a collective identification of themselves along the city. -/- The continuous reinforced concrete bench is 1.10 m wide, in order to allow people to use it in non-conventional ways. Further up on the slope, undulating paths separate plant species and provide access for gardening, but are also open to use by the public. They are paved with 2 meter-long precast concrete slabs (smaller and lighter pieces were avoided to deter robbery). As they reach the gabions they connect with sloping paths covered with loose granitic stones. The gabions themselves allow the creation of varying slopes while contributing to retaining the soil, which is reinforced with geosynthetic fabric in the perimeter to avoid landslides originated by strong rains typical of the region. -/- Urban furniture is featured on the wider bays of the sidewalk and at corner plazas. It includes seats, water fountains, bicycle racks, wastepaper baskets. As a counterpoint to the linear concrete bench, groups of concrete seats are arranged informally. These seats are a reinterpretation of the dynamic BKF chair (also known as Butterfly chair), the classic Argentinean design of the 1930’ by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy. A few low concrete tables complete these spaces as authentic urban lounges. Lighting design accompanies the general features of the project and creates a new scenography emphasizing night-time usage. -/- Landscape gardening criteria is set up by a selection of various species of high-resistant pasture (grass). The higher the slope, the higher the grass, increasing the final volumetric result. Based on considering the original tipas line (tipuana tipu, a species from the north of Argentina, yellow flowering) as a vertical wall that frames the view, the horizontal stripes contain a single species each, differing in size, shade and flowering periods –adding, in the middle band, a changing color on the big green plane slope in the same chromatic range. The final configuration of the stripe sequence from bottom to top: bermuda grass, bulbine frutescens, euryops pectinatus. The upper band existing native species is reinforced with new samples: paspalum exaltatum + cortadera selloana and ipomea + thumbergia climbing the railway fence. Each sector between gabions has an automated system of drip irrigation. Near the corner plazas, several palms are planted to provide shade and identity to the street-crossing. -/- The intervention proposes an ambivalent effect on the landscape, trascending the merely ornamental by accompanying the motorist in speed, while conforting the pedestrian with spaces for contemplation and urban relax. (shrink)

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical (...) work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance, and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility. (shrink)

We experience resistance when we are engaging with fictional works which present certain (for example, morally objectionable) claims. But in virtue of what properties do sentences trigger this ‘imaginative resistance’? I argue that while most accounts of imaginative resistance have looked for semantic properties in virtue of which sentences trigger it, this is unlikely to give us a coherent account, because imaginative resistance is a pragmatic phenomenon. It works in a way very similar to Paul Grice's (...) widely analysed ‘conversational implicature’. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. On one influential diagnosis of imaginative resistance, the systematic difficulties are due to these particular propositions’ discordance with real-world norms. This essay argues that this influential diagnosis is too simple. While imagination is indeed by default constrained by real-world norms during narrative engagement, it can be freed with the power of genre conventions and expectations.

What reasons stand in favor of (or against) violent resistance to oppression? I distinguish two kinds of normative reasons that bear relevantly in such a practical deliberation. I argue that in addition to reasons of impartial morality, victims’ personal projects and relationships may also provide reasons for (or against) violent resistance. Moreover, there is no guarantee that conflicts will not occur between such reasons. Thus, some acts of violent resistance may arise from situations of radical choice in (...) which impartial moral reasons and personal reasons pull the agent in opposite directions. Regardless of what we ultimately think agents facing such decisions ought to do all things considered, recognizing such conflicts is crucial for understanding the circumstances that give rise to violence and for better sympathizing with victims who are pushed to such extreme modes of resistance. (shrink)

Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. (...) Because capacities for evidence-responsiveness are fallible and may be masked, beliefs can be held in the face of counter-evidence. Indeed, I will argue that our best science of belief supports the claim that evidence-resistant beliefs result from masks on evidence-responsiveness capacities. This account of belief not only allows for resistance to evidence, but provides us with a framework for describing and explaining actual cases of evidence-resistance. (shrink)

Linda Martín Alcoff and others have emphasised that the discipline of philosophy suffers from a ‘demographic problem’. The persistence of this problem is partly the consequence of various forms of resistance to efforts to address the demographic problem. Such resistance is complex and takes many forms and could be responded to in different ways. In this paper, I argue that our attempts to explain and understand the phenomenon of resistance should use a kind of explanatory pluralism that, (...) following Quassim Cassam, I call multidimensionalism. I describe four general kinds of resistance and consider varying explanations, focusing on those focused on vices and social structures. I argue that vice-explanations and structural- explanations are both mutually consistent and mutually entailing. If so, there is no need to choose between vice explanations and structural explanations or any other kinds of explanation. We can and should be multidimensionalists: using many together is better. (shrink)

I attempt to adjudicate the disagreement between those who seek to reconceptualize disability as mere difference and their opponents. I do so by reviewing a central conviction motivating the resistance, concerning the relationship between disability and well-being. I argue that the conviction depends on further considerations about the costs and extent of change involved in accommodating individuals with a particular disability trait. I conclude by considering three pay-offs of this clarification.

What responsibilities do audiences have in engaging with artworks? Certain audience responses seem quite clear: for example, audiences should not vandalize or destroy artworks; they should not disrupt performances. This paper examines other kinds of resisting responses that audiences sometimes engage in, including petitioning the artist to change their works, altering copies of artworks, and creating new artworks in another artist’s fictional world. I argue for five claims: (1) while these actions can sometimes infringe on the rights of artists, the (...) rights of artists are not absolute; (2) the fact that such actions are based on mistaken interpretations of the artworks has no normative weight; (3) there can be reason to object to additions and alterations whose conception of the artwork is morally worse than the original (and so, there can be reason to support additions and alterations whose conception is morally better); (4) petitioning raises special moral problems; and, most important, (5) some of these actions are valuable because they involve creative and aesthetic activity. Those acts of audience resistance that are creative, morally improve on the original work, and that minimize the infringement of the artists’ rights are good, and should be encouraged. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. Philosophers have primarily theorized about this phenomenon from the armchair. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of empirical methods for investigating imaginative resistance. We present two studies that help to establish the psychological reality of imaginative resistance, and to uncover one factor that is significant for explaining this phenomenon but low in psychological salience: genre. Furthermore, our studies have the methodological (...) upshot of showing how empirical tools can complement the predominant armchair approach to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. -/- However, there (...) are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of nonconsensual social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declarations of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups. (shrink)

An important recent distinction in the empirical literature about self-control is between resisting and avoiding temptations. While we have evidence that avoiding temptations is the more efficient method of the two, philosophers have focused almost exclusively on resisting temptations. The aim of this paper is to examine what the ability to avoid temptations depends on and argue that it depends primarily on how fragmented one’s mind is: on the inconsistencies in one’s mental setup. The fragmentation of mind requires a significant (...) amount of mental effort to conceal from oneself and this leads to a weakened ability to resist temptations. (shrink)

Can one refute Berkeleyan phenomenalism by arguing that sensory objects seem mind-independent, and that, according to Berkeley, experience is to be taken at face value? Relying on Mackie’s recent discussion of the issue, I argue, first, that phenomenalism cannot be straightforwardly refuted by relying on perceptual or bodily experience of mind-independence together with the truthfulness of experience. However, I maintain, second that phenomenalism can be indirectly refuted by appealing to the bodily experience of resistance. Such experience presents us with (...) the causal activity of the resisting physical object. If experience is truthful, as the phenomenalist has it, physical objects are causally active. But then their effects no longer depend on our perceiving them, on pain of overdetermination. (shrink)

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and (...) modal epistemology. (shrink)

In this chapter, we evaluate the politically generative dynamic of urban space. Notably, we put forward the notion of the ‘multiplier effect’ of the urban, referring to its ingrained tendency to multiply resistance to oppression and violence being exerted against subaltern groups and minorities and, in doing so, to turn this multiplied resistance into an active force of social change. We, therefore, look at the twofold valence of ‘resistance’: negative and affirmative. Resistance initially takes form as (...) a defensive response to oppression and violence. When this happens, the urban becomes the living platform for a multiplying dynamic of encounter and, potentially, of inter-group solidarity, thus laying the foundations for a cooperative – rather than competitive, as in neoliberal rationality, or inimical, as in national-populist reason – way of ‘being together’. After having developed this argument against the backdrop of the women’s movement in Tehran and the urban disobedience to anti-immigration policies in Italy, our chapter concludes by reflecting on the multiplier effect of urban resistance within the current context of national revanchism. (shrink)

I defend the view that the experience of resistance gives us a direct phenomenal access to the mind-independence of perceptual objects. In the first part, I address a humean objection against the very possibility of experiencing existential mind-independence. The possibility of an experience of mind-independence being secured, I argue in the second part that the experience of resistance is the only kind of experience by which we directly access existential mind-independence.

While philosophers have highlighted important reasons to resist one’s own oppression, they tend to overlook the phenomenon of complacency about one’s own oppression. This paper addresses this gap by arguing that some oppressed agents are obligated to resist complacency about their own oppression because failing to do so would significantly harm themselves and others. Complacent members of oppressed groups fail to resist meaningfully, are self-satisfied, and are epistemically culpable. I contend that focusing on the obligation to combat complacency is useful (...) for at least two reasons. First, complacency about one’s own oppression is a distinctive phenomenon that warrants separate philosophical attention. Second, focusing on the obligation to resist complacency helps analyze an undertheorized group of oppressed agents by challenging the binary understanding of power prevalent in the literature on the duty to resist, thereby sharpening philosophical accounts of resistance and filling a gap in a prominent well-being-based theory of resistance. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was likewise constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling (...) to be classified as thing or property. As I engage selected passages and key events from Douglass's narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance tactics. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – (...) I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

Intuitively, many people seem to hold that engaging in acts of virtual murder in videogames is morally permissible, whereas engaging in acts of virtual child molestation is morally impermissible. The Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11:31–36, 2009) challenges these intuitions by arguing that it is unclear whether there is a morally relevant difference between these two types of virtual actions. There are two main responses in the literature to this dilemma. First, attempts to resolve the dilemma by defending (...) an account of the relevant moral differences between virtual murder and virtual child molestation. Second, attempts to dissolve the dilemma by undermining the intuitions that ground it. In this paper, we argue that a narrow version of the Gamer’s Dilemma seems to survive attempts to resolve or dissolve it away entirely, since neither approach seems to be able to solve the dilemma for all cases. We thus provide a contextually sensitive version of the dilemma that more accurately tracks onto the intuitions of gamers. However, we also argue that the intuitions that ground the narrow version of the Dilemma may not have a moral foundation, and we put forward alternative non-moral normative foundations that seem to better account for the remaining intuitive difference between the two types of virtual actions. We also respond to proposed solutions to the Gamer’s Dilemma in novel ways and set out areas for future empirical work in this area. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to investigate modalities of resistance to sexual violence. It begins from the observation that the nature of what we understand ourselves to be resisting—that is, how we define the scope, content, and causes of sexual violence—will have profound implications for how we are able to resist. I critically engage one model of resistance to sexual violence: feminist philosophical scholarship on self-defense, highlighting several shortcomings in how the feminist self-defense discourse inadvertently frames (...) sexual violence. Holding these criticisms in mind, I expand the landscape of resistance to sexual violence by considering the new possibilities that empathy might offer. The work of two contemporary women of color feminists—Roxane Gay and Tarana Burke—launches further exploration of empathy’s alternative modes of resistance. By focusing on empathy between survivors of sexual violence, we can expand our understanding of the possibilities of resistance by redistributing and broadening our attention in three main ways: from action to affect and attitude, from a spatially and temporally limited event to something more expansive, and from the individual through the interpersonal to the structural. (shrink)

Arguments from divine hiddenness attempt to show that God, as understood by traditional Christianity, does not exist.Eleonore Stump has argued that, contrary to a key premise in such arguments, it is possible for God to have a personal relationship with human beings who do not believe that he exists. I describe Stump’s account of the will and describe its connection to her explanation of divine hiddenness. Specifically, I show that her account of the knowledge of persons cannot solve the problem (...) of divine hiddenness. I also argue that Stump’s account of the will commits her to the claim that lacking belief in God’s existence entails resistance to God’s grace. (shrink)

In this paper, we clarify, unpack, and ultimately resist what is perhaps the most prominent argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism: the epistemic argument for compatibilism. We focus on one such argument as articulated by David Lewis: (i) we know we are free, (ii) for all we know everything is predetermined, (iii) if we know we are free but for all we know everything is predetermined, then for all we know we are free but everything is predetermined, (...) (iv) if for all we know we are free but predetermined, then it is really possible that we are, so (v) compatibilism. We uncover how the crucial epistemic modality underlying (iv) must be understood, and contend that, understood this way, the libertarian can resist (iv). Importantly, however, resisting the argument does commit the libertarian to what has been called “flip-flopping”—but we argue that this is perfectly coherent. We conclude by articulating two crucially ways the libertarian can resist the argument, by saying that we can know that determinism is false "from the armchair". (shrink)

The discipline of academic philosophy suffers from serious problems of diversity and inclusion whose acknowledgement and amelioration are often resisted by members of our profession. In this paper, I distinguish four main modes of resistance—naiveté, conservatism, pride, and hostility—and describe how and why they manifest by using them as the basis for a typology of types of ‘resister’. This typology can hopefully be useful to those of us trying to counteract such resistance in ways sensitive to the different (...) motives and strategies that these resisters tend to employ. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of theories of performativity in order to analyse Max Weber’s sovereignty–legitimacy paradigm. First, I highlight an essential articulation between legitimacy and sovereign ipseity (understood, beyond the sole example of State sovereignty, as the autopositioned power-to-be-oneself). Second, I identify a more originary force of legitimation, which remains foreign to the order of performative ipseity because it is the condition for both its position and its deconstruction. This suggests an essential fallibility of the (...) performative, which implies a ‘mystical’ legitimacy and a paradoxical, divisible and self-differential representation of sovereignty. The structural differentiality of legitimacy and sovereignty signifies an irreducible coloniality of law and language, but also suggests the possibility of an unconditional resistance located in the radical interpretability of the law, beyond determined representations of powers, dominations, sovereignties or resistances. This reflection is triggered by a reading of Cynthia Weber’s theory of ‘performative states’, describing sovereignty under the form of an impossible ontology, which leads me to elaborate the notion of legitimation-to-come as a non-ontological ‘concept’: this notion of unconditional legitimacy, beyond sovereignty, binds beliefs and phantasms to the unpresentable force of the event. Pursuing the efforts of scholars such as Rob Walker and Cynthia Weber, I sketch the implications of this archi-performative legitimacy regarding the methodological protocols of International Relations and sociology, in view of elucidating the persistent ontological presuppositions of these disciplines. (shrink)

What does it mean to intentionally not perform an action? Is it possible to not perform an action out of resistant intention? Is there sufficient language for talking about this kind of behavior in the social sciences? In this article, a nonnormative vocabulary of not doings including resistant intentional omissions is developed. Unlike concepts that describe official, overt, and public resistance, James Scott’s everyday resistance and Albert Hirschman’s exit have made it possible to talk about the resistant inactions (...) of agents in the social sciences. But in order to grasp the ordinariness of this kind of oppositional behavior, philosophy of intentional omissions is used. (shrink)

This paper rehabilitates the Stoic conception of blending from the ground up, by freeing the Stoic conception of body from three interpretive presuppositions. First, the twin hylomorphic presuppositions that where there is body there is matter, and that where there is reason or quality there is an incorporeal. Then, the atomistic presupposition that body is absolutely full and rigid, and the attendant notion that resistance (antitupia) must be ricochet. I argue that once we clear away these presuppositions about body, (...) the foundations of Stoic corporealism fall into place. Body is fundamental (not hylomorphic). The two fundamental principles (archai) are bodies: divine active reason (logos) and passive matter (hulē); and these two bodies are two, not matter and form all over again, nor actual and potential, but agent and patient. The independence of the two archai is no threat to the unity of the cosmos, however, because the Stoic theory of body allows for the complete coextension of the archai. The hylomorphic thinker rightly asks, what relation could be tighter than that of the wax and its shape? The Stoic replies: a causal relation, the interaction of agent and patient completely coextended in a through and through blend. (shrink)

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

Working from within the Lakatosian framework of scientific change, this paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the Jesuits’ role in the scientific revolution during the years of Galileo’s trials and the subsequent century. Their received research program was Aristotelian cosmology. Their efforts to construct protective belts to shield the core principles were fueled not only by the basic instinct to conserve but also by the impact of official prohibitions from the side of Church authorities. The paper illustrates how (...) these Church restrictions were not as paralyzing for Jesuit intellectuals as has often been thought. They left considerable space for maneuvering. The paper shows how, within this space, Jesuits were engaged mainly in the indispensable task of exhausting all the potential of Aristotelian cosmology. They did this primarily by trying to build intellectual bridges to ensure coherence between three realms of the cosmological imagination of the time: the received Aristotelian view, the new empirical data, and the realm of everyday experience. (shrink)

This essay proposes a new way to read José Martí's idea of "Nuestra América," one that focuses on the mode of the call for unity toward liberation and decoloniality. In particular, I offer the arguments for this Latin American unity that would define a collective form of resistance against our colonial past and present (Europe) and an imperialist future (USA). It can be argued that it is extremely difficult to translate the Cuban author's thought by itself to our contemporary (...) struggles, and that this notion runs the risk of being an outdated, naïve, and even detrimental reduction of a too complex racial reality. In this essay, I defend a way in which this notion is still relevant today by alluding to the mode of a decolonial return to one's own land in the works of Édouard Glissant and Gloria Anzaldúa. In these two authors I see elements of the criticism of a colonial rootedness and filiation, linking a decolonial attitude toward the land with a particular way of returning to it: one that challenges a mythical, pure territorial space, and also reimagines the temporality of the return by focusing on the present. With the help of this novel gesture of returning to the land, I argue that Martí's nuestra América voices a call for unity and independence that still has value beyond its undeniable shortcomings. (shrink)

In evolutionary medicine and other related fields, the concept of evolutionary mismatch is used to explain phenomena whereby traits reduce in adaptive value and eventually become maladaptive as the environment changes. This article argues that there is a similar problem of persistent adaptivity—what has been called the problem of evolutionary novelty—and it introduces the concept of mismatch resistance in order to explain phenomena whereby traits retain their adaptive value in novel environments that are radically different from the organisms’ environment (...) of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The possible role of variability selection in the evolution of mismatch-resistant traits is discussed, and it is suggested that mismatch resistance provides a useful tool for making progress on certain issues related to evolutionary theory, such as the modularity debate, cases of adaptivity outside of organisms’ ancestral environment, and the viability of naturalism as an overarching philosophical framework for understanding the natural world. (shrink)

We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical (...) evidence that shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction. (shrink)

With the advance of CRISPR technology, parents will be tempted to create superior offspring who are healthier, smarter, and stronger. In addition to the fact that many of these procedures are considered immoral for Catholics, they could change human nature in radical and possibly disastrous ways. This article focuses on the question of human perfectionism. First, by considering the relationship between human nature and technology, it analyzes whether such advances can improve human nature in addition to curing diseases. Next, it (...) looks at the moral and spiritual dimensions of perfection by analyzing the cardinal virtues. It argues that seeking perfection in the physical sense alone may not be prudent or wise and may produce greater injustices and weaken the human spirit in the long run. Understanding our true calling to perfection can help us resist the temptation of hubris to enhance the human race through technology. (shrink)

People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes (...) and consequences of resistance to belief change for five diverse and less contentious socio-political issues. After participants chose initially to support or oppose a given socio-political position, they were provided with reasons favoring their chosen position (affirming reasons), reasons favoring the other, unchosen position (conflicting reasons), or all reasons for both positions (reasons for both sides). Our results indicate that participants are more likely to stick with their initial decisions than to change them no matter which reasons are considered, and that this resistance to belief change is likely due to a motivated, biased evaluation of the reasons to support their initial beliefs (prior-belief bias). More specifically, they rated affirming reasons more favorably than conflicting reasons—even after accounting for reported prior knowledge about the issue, the novelty of the reasons presented, and the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. In many cases, participants who did not change their positions tended to become more confident in the superiority of their positions after considering many reasons for both sides. (shrink)

In this paper, we tackle the widely held view that practice-oriented approaches to ethics are conservative, preserving the moral status quo, and, in particular, that they do not promote any (fundamental) change in our dealings with animals or formulate clear principles that help us to achieve such change. We shall challenge this view with reference to Wittgensteinian ethics. As a first step, we show that moral thought and action rest on basic moral certainties like: equals are to be treated equally (...) and unequals unequally. We then explore the relations between this insight and the notion of the difficulty of reality elaborated by Cora Diamond. Our goal is to show that a Wittgensteinian-Diamondian approach to animal ethics is not necessarily morally conservative. Indeed, it offers a profound practice-oriented approach to animal ethics that is capable of promoting change in human dealings with animals because it is compatible with radical critique. (shrink)

The article explores the landscape in higher education in which old binary divisions are officially denied yet have been reinvigorated through a mix of conservative and neo-liberal policies. Efforts to resist such pressures can happen at different levels, including, in this case, module design and classroom practice. The rationale for such resistance is considered in relationship to the authors’ political and moral standpoints. Debates within higher education policy circles are invariably reduced to a series of oppositions: theory and practice; (...) training and education; research and teaching. The article seeks to break down such polarities through an exploration of classroom practice. In fact, we argue that such distinctions help to legitimize the existing inequalities in higher education and group-based harms, which characterize the sector. Instead, a case is made for a pedagogy that enables students, particularly those from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds, to use their experiences, values, etc. to exchange and develop ideas in a group context, thereby providing an important means of collective empowerment (intellectual and practical, both at work and in their private lives). In this process students are encouraged to use ethical theories as tools to explain and underpin their understanding of work-based scenarios. The role of the academic is to facilitate such exchanges and foster new ethical approaches and a public awareness and engagement that goes beyond the classroom. The pedagogic approach, drawing on notions of relational autonomy and narrative methods as well as providing spaces for the co-production of new knowledge, confirms the indivisibility of research and teaching. (shrink)

This article focuses on the imposition of modern education upon the foraging Raute people and the ways in which this project has been both reluctantly accepted and actively resisted by the Raute. The Nepalese government established schools for Raute children as part of the nation-state development policy. However, it has refused to incorporate their cultural values, traditions, customs and language into the school curriculum. This paper argues that in attempting to create forms of domination through the educational process the state (...) fosters inequality. Such an arrangement is met with everyday forms of resistance through non-collective and unorganised behaviour of Raute children at school. The Raute’s silent reaction against the government policies typifies the cultural disposition and ethos of the Raute community. This paper is based on research methods that include observation, interviews, informal discussions and document analysis, and outlines the interconnections between family, social class, students and state agency as they relate to education. In particular, it explores the Raute’s own narratives, perspectives and reactions with regard to their educational processes. This case study is presented in an effort to better understand the relations between resistance and reproduction of knowledge in foraging societies. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health concern and is associated with the over- or inappropriate use of antimicrobials in both humans and agriculture. While there has been reco- gnition of this problem on the part of agricultural and public health authorities, there has none- theless been significant difficulty in translating policy recommendations into practical guidelines. In this paper, we examine the process of public health policy development in Quebec agriculture, with a focus on the case of pork production (...) and the role of food animal veterinarians in policy making. We argue that a tendency to employ strictly techno-scientific risk analyses of antimicro- bial use ignores the fundamental social, economic and political realities of key stakeholders and so limits the applicability of policy recommendations developed by government advisory groups. In particular, we suggest that veterinarians’ personal and professional interests, and their ethi- cal norms of practice, are key factors to both the problem of and the solution to the current over-reliance on antimicrobials in food production. (shrink)

The problem of self-knowledge has been thoroughly discussed in the context of traditional epistemology. In parallel to the traditional approach to epistemology, Radically Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) has emerged in the last 30 years as a genuine contender in its field. According to RECS, the unity of analysis of cognitive processes is the dynamics between brain, body and environment. In this paper, I advance a RECS approach to self-knowledge, which immediately suggests that knowing oneself is a matter of knowing what (...) one’s body can do. I then turn to resistance training, particularly weightlifting, and argue that it offers a paradigmatic case of self-knowledge in RECS’s terms. More precisely, resistance training allows the trainee to achieve knowledge of themselves in a fundamentally practical manner—and doing so is transformative of the kind of actions they are capable of. (shrink)

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical (...) presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

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

Thèse de la résistance : l’expérience de la résistance est une condition nécessaire de notre idée d’un monde extérieur.

In this paper I argue that, in addition to having an obligation to resist the oppression of others, people have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression. This obligation to oneself, I argue, is grounded in a Kantian duty of self-respect.