As a group, Black and Latino boys face persistent and devastating disparities in achievement when compared to their White counterparts: they are more likely to obtain low test scores and grades, be categorized as learning disabled, be absent from honors and gifted programs, and be overrepresented among students who are suspended and expelled from school. They are also less likely to enroll in college and more likely to drop out. Put simply, they are among the most vulnerable populations in our (...) schools. _Schooling for Resilience_ investigates how seven newly formed schools, created specifically to serve boys of color, set out to address the broad array of academic and social problems faced by Black and Latino boys. Drawing on student and teacher surveys, focus groups, interviews, and classroom observations, the authors investigate how these schools were developed, what practices they employed, and how their students responded academically and socially. In particular, they focus on the theory of action that informed each school’s approach to educating Black and Latino boys and explore how choices about school structure and culture shaped students’ development and achievement. In doing so, the authors identify educational strategies that all schools can learn from. This thoughtful, passionately argued volume promises to influence efforts to improve the achievement and life outcomes of Black and Latino boys for years to come. (shrink)

Purpose‐driven businesses have a stated objective to contribute to the welfare of society and the planet alongside generating shareholder value. As interest in purpose‐driven businesses grows, an emerging “purpose ecosystem” of advisers, investors, and enablers offers different types of support for businesses wanting to transition to sustainability. This paper examines how the transition towards purpose‐driven business in Australia and the United Kingdom requires addressing challenges facing this support ecosystem at three levels. First, at the individual level where support providers need (...) to build the capabilities of managers who are experiencing tensions around integrating societal and environmental purpose while facing pressure for maximizing shareholder value. Second, the support providers working within the purpose ecosystem offering professional advice and finance face their own tensions between environmental or social objectives and commercial pressures. Third, there are challenges facing actors in the ecosystems aiming to change the wider policy and institutional environment but facing lobbying from those wanting to keep “business as usual.” We identify practical implications for those parts of the purpose‐driven business ecosystem providing support. This includes building capabilities to combine social, environmental, and commercial purpose; coordination among support providers; and creating an institutional environment to avoid “purpose wash.”. (shrink)

Purpose-driven businesses have a stated objective to contribute to the welfare of society and the planet alongside generating shareholder value. As interest in purpose-driven businesses grows, an emerging “purpose ecosystem” of advisers, investors, and enablers offers different types of support for businesses wanting to transition to sustainability. This paper examines how the transition towards purpose-driven business in Australia and the United Kingdom requires addressing challenges facing this support ecosystem at three levels. First, at the individual level where support providers need (...) to build the capabilities of managers who are experiencing tensions around integrating societal and environmental purpose while facing pressure for maximizing shareholder value. Second, the support providers working within the purpose ecosystem offering professional advice and finance face their own tensions between environmental or social objectives and commercial pressures. Third, there are challenges facing actors in the ecosystems aiming to change the wider policy and institutional environment but facing lobbying from those wanting to keep “business as usual.” We identify practical implications for those parts of the purpose-driven business ecosystem providing support. This includes building capabilities to combine social, environmental, and commercial purpose; coordination among support providers; and creating an institutional environment to avoid “purpose wash.”. (shrink)

Abstract:Contenders for serious, let alone worthwhile, philosophical works consisting entirely of jokes are hard to find. Tom Stoppard's comedy Dogg's Hamlet, built from the materials of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, might be one. Wittgenstein could only use previously acquired language to argue that social performance is a necessary prerequisite for the process of learning that meaningful language in the first place. But Stoppard's audiences can experience the inadequacy of a static, constative theory of language; then they can self-consciously undergo a (...) socialized process of meaningful language acquisition. And that new language allows new jokes; so: did Stoppard put the wit into Wittgenstein? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 4: The Summer of Our DiscontentCaroline EdwardsI write this response on the eve of another wave of industrial action in the UK in November 2022—the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) “UCU Rising” campaign, the latest in a series of regular disputes over pay and working conditions, the gender and ethnicities pay gap, and casualisation that has been ongoing since 2018. In 2022’s “summer of discontent,” we’ve seen our (...) rail, maritime and transport workers, airport staff, bus drivers, telecommunications workers, postal workers, nurses, refuse workers, and higher and further education staff engage in ongoing industrial disputes with intractable bosses. Even criminal barristers continue with an indefinite, uninterrupted strike after years of government cuts and chronic underinvestment. Everywhere you look, there is a palpable sense of a country on its knees. It’s nearly 100 years since the last General Strike of 1926 and in the UK it’s looking increasingly likely that we will have another General Strike on our hands soon. In “Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive Utopianism” Antonis Balasopoulos contextualizes this within the longer economic durée of the shift from Fordist production to so-called flexible accumulation after 1972, writing in this issue that “the turn of capital to the faster and higher [End Page 554] profits involved in financialization rather than infrastructural and industrial investment, form much of the objective, structural ground for what can only be described as the rapid rise of a dystopian structure of feeling in western societies since the early 1970s.” Antonis’s brilliant summary reminds us of the monumental scale of the challenges facing utopian thought and praxis in our current moment. Make no mistake—the “crisis ordinariness” of everyday life under late capitalism that Lauren Berlant identified in Cruel Optimism (2011) has intensified in the years following the Global Financial Crisis (2007–8), the wave of Occupy protests in 2011, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–). “For some time now,” as Antonis writes, the utopian goals of “happiness, fulfilment, [and] emancipation... have been out of the question altogether.”It’s hard not to agree with this assessment, given the current chaos of life in the UK. Adam Stock’s roundtable contribution “Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence” focuses on the academy’s complicity with the neoliberal financialization of what were previously protected as public goods (education, our health service, transport infrastructure, and so on) over the past three decades. As Adam notes, the rhetoric of “excellence” that has come to dominate all areas of university life—teaching, research, public engagement, and the quantifiable “impact” of university research beyond the academy—is really just another way of using competition to mask the market logic of scarcity. Swingeing cuts to publicly funded research have led to a scarcity of resources in scholarly knowledge production, which is legitimated through the discourse of “excellence” and “prestige.” Only a handful of elite research leaders are granted awards and the value of all research becomes judged by its proximity to this distribution (concentration) of wealth within a small number of institutions. Defending education as a public good has long given way to the desperate, existential struggle for survival at UK universities. Numerous institutions are on the brink of bankruptcy, which was the goal all along for the ideologically driven Office for Students (OfS). Market exit, as they euphemistically term it, proves market efficiency.At my own institution, Birkbeck, University of London, the challenge to utopian thinking is all too violently clear. Birkbeck has a special place in the UK higher education system—a university founded nearly 200 years ago in the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand (it was called the London Mechanics’ Institution back then) to offer education to working-class Londoners that [End Page 555] fitted around their busy working lives. As my colleague Joanna Bourke writes in Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (2022), life expectancy in the poorest parts of London was just twenty-nine years; cholera, typhoid, and typhus were major killers; and illiteracy was widespread. At Birkbeck, we are the only university to teach evening classes and offer the requisite support... (shrink)

This paper aims to show that Sartre’s later work represents a valuable resource for feminist scholarship that remains relatively untapped. It analyses Sartre’s discussions of women’s attitude towards their situation from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s, alongside Beauvoir’s account of women’s situation in The Second Sex, to trace the development of Sartre’s thought on the structure of gendered experience. It argues that Sartre transitions from reducing psychological oppression to self-deception in Being and Nothingness to construing women as ‘survivors’ of it (...) in The Family Idiot. Then, it underlines the potential for Sartre’s mature existentialism to contribute to current debates in feminist philosophy by illuminating the role of the imagination in women’s psychological oppression. (shrink)

Dr Edwards' stimulating and provocative book advances the thesis that the appropriate axiomatic basis for inductive inference is not that of probability, with its addition axiom, but rather likelihood - the concept introduced by Fisher as a measure of relative support amongst different hypotheses. Starting from the simplest considerations and assuming no more than a modest acquaintance with probability theory, the author sets out to reconstruct nothing less than a consistent theory of statistical inference in science.

What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? Douglas Edwards tackles these questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. He argues that in some domains language responds to the world, whereas in others language generates the world.

Humanitarian aid workers typically reject the accolade of hero as both untrue and undesirable. Untrue when they claim not to be acting beyond the call of duty, and undesirable so far as celebrating heroism risks elevating “heroic” choices over safer, and perhaps wiser ones. However, this leaves unresolved a tension between the denial of heroism and a sense in which certain humanitarian acts really appear heroic. And, the concern that in rejecting the aspiration to heroism an opportunity is lost to (...) inspire more and better humanitarian action. Having set out this problem in more detail in Part I, the argument in Part II will suggest that a virtue ethics approach to humanitarian moral obligations can make good sense of our intuitions concerning the role of heroism in humanitarian action. In Part III I will argue that at least “professional” humanitarians, instead of rejecting heroism, should aim to be heroes, in the sense of displaying a virtue of humanity in high-stakes contexts, because this is consistent with the aim of humanitarian action. Finally, some lingering problems of demandingness and motivation are considered. (shrink)

The practice of prenatal screening for disability is sometimes objected to because of the hurt and offence such practices may cause to people currently living with disabilities. This objection is commonly termed “the expressivist objection”. In response to the objection it is standardly claimed that disabilities are analogous to illnesses. And just as it would be implausible to suppose reduction of the incidence of illnesses such as flu sends a negative message to ill people, so it is not plausible to (...) suppose prevention of disability sends a negative message to disabled people. The expressivist objection hinges, however, upon a view of the relationship between disability and self identity which sees disability as part of the identity of the disabled person, in a way in which illnesses such as flu cannot be. This possibility is generally not considered in critiques of the expressivist objection. In this paper, an “identity claim” to the effect that disabilities can be identity constituting is accepted and the force of the expressivist argument is reconsidered in the light of its acceptance. It is concluded that even when such an identity claim is accepted, the expressivist objection is still not morally compelling. (shrink)

Discursive psychology approaches discourse not as the product or expression of thoughts or mental states lying behind or beneath it, but as a domain of public accountability in which psychological states are made relevant. DP draws heavily on conversation analysis in examining in close empirical detail how ostensibly psychological themes are handled and managed as part of talk’s everyday interactional business. A brief worked example is offered, in which the intentionality of a person’s actions is handled in the course of (...) police interrogation, in ways that perform police work. Degrees of intentionality are partialled out with regard to specific actions or components of actions, and with regard to how actions are described in ways that map onto how crime categories are defined in law. Cognitive states are generally relevant in discourse in the same manner, as participants’ concerns with regard to action categories and accountability on and for the occasions they are invoked. (shrink)

Conscious experience has been said to be outside of, or alien to, physics, and unexplained in a physical world. However, it is argued here that experience is entirely expected in a physical world that can only be defined by its power to determine patterns of experience. Something physical is something with the type of causal power that can contribute to determining the content of an experience if a subject is present at the right place and time. Physical powers also interact (...) with other physical powers, distant from any given subject, to form chains, and it is these interactions that physics handles mathematically. Nevertheless, actual causation is always defined by reference to determination of experience. The apparent puzzle of why there should be a link between experience and the physical may relate in part to the fact that experience is always immediately causally proximal, always 'here and now', at least as far as we can ascertain. Proximality, and with it the potential for mentality, cuts across existential/ ontological categories. Experience also requires a concept of an intrinsic individual, in order for there to be individual points of view. The practical problem for consciousness studies is to identify intrinsically individual causal units with event domains in human brains, that can have points of view and content that could fit with human experiences, in a way consistent with current physics. It is suggested that the 'causal diamond' concept of the here and now explored by Savitt (2015) and Arthur (2019), together with principles of field theory, may provide a useful starting point. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 39-41.

We examine the asking and answering of `silly questions' in British police interviews with suspects, the courses of action SQs initiate, and the institutional contingencies they are designed to manage. We show how SQs are asked at an important juncture toward the ends of interviews, following police officers' formulations of suspects' testimony. These formulations are confirmed or even collaboratively produced by suspects. We then examine the design of SQs and show how they play a central role in the articulation of (...) suspects' reported `state of mind', and particularly attributing to them criminal intentions constitutive of the offence with which they may be charged. In cases where SQs do not produce unambiguous answers about `state of mind' or intentionality, police officers move toward direct questioning about suspects' intent, thus making explicit the project of SQs in such interviews. Following SQ—Answer sequences, police officers reformulate suspects' testimony, with subtle but crucial differences with regard to suspects' knowledge state and criminal intent. Suspects overwhelmingly align with police officers' formulations of their testimony, and such agreements have the interactional shape of affiliation. Yet SQs may work in ways that are institutionally adversarial with regard to criminal charges, relevant evidence and self-incriminating testimony. (shrink)

This collection of original articles, written by leading contemporary European and American philosophers of religion, is presented in celebration of the publication of the fiftieth volume of the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Following the Editor's Introduction, John Macquarrie, Adriaan Peperzak, and Hent de Vries take up central themes in continental philosophy of religion. Macquarrie analyzes postmodernism and its influence in philosophy and theology. Peperzak argues for a form of universality different from that of modern philosophy, and de Vries (...) analyzes an intrinsic and structural relationship between religion and the media. The next three essays discuss issues in analytic philosophy of religion. Philip Quinn argues that religious diversity reduces the epistemic status of exclusivism and makes it possible for a religious person to be justified while living within a pluralistic environment. William Wainwright plumbs the work of Jonathan Edwards in order to better understand debates concerning freedom, determinism, and the problem of evil, and William Hasker asks whether theological incompatibilism is less inimical to traditional theism than some have supposed. Representing the Thomist tradition, Fergus Kerr challenges standard readings of Aquinas on the arguments for the existence of God. David Griffin analyzes the contributions of process philosophy to the problem of evil and the relation between science and religion. Illustrating comparative approaches, Keith Ward argues that the Semitic and Indian traditions have developed a similar concept of God that should be revised in view of post-Enlightenment theories of the individual and the historical. Keith Yandell explores themes in the Indian metaphysical tradition and considers what account of persons is most in accord with reincarnation and karma doctrines. Feminist philosophy of religion is represented in Pamela Anderson's article, in which she argues for a gender-sensitive and more inclusive approach to the craving for infinitude. (shrink)

Background: Alexithymia is a personality trait which is characterized by an inability to identify and describe conscious emotions of oneself and others.Aim: The present study aimed to determine whether various measures of mental health, interoception, psychological flexibility, and self-as-context, predicted through linear associations alexithymia as an outcome. This also included relevant mediators and non-linear predictors identified for particular sub-groups of participants through cluster analyses of an Artificial Neural Network output.Methodology: Two hundred and thirty participants completed an online survey which included (...) the following questionnaires: Toronto alexithymia scale; Acceptance and Action Questionnaire 2 ; Positive and Negative Affect Scale, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale 21 ; Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness ; and the Self-as-Context scale. A stepwise backwards linear regression and mediation analysis were performed, as well as a cluster analysis of the non-linear ANN upper hidden layer output.Results: Higher levels of alexithymia were associated with increased psychological inflexibility, lower positive affect scores, and lower interoception for the subscales of “not distracting” and “attention regulation.” SAC mediated the relation between emotional regulation and total alexithymia. The ANNs accounted for more of the variance than the linear regressions, and were able to identify complex and varied patterns within the participant subgroupings.Conclusion: The findings were discussed within the context of developing a SAC processed-based therapeutic model for alexithymia, where it is suggested that alexithymia is a complex and multi-faceted condition, which requires a similarly complex, and process-based approach to accurately diagnose and treat this condition. (shrink)

Alethic pluralism, on one version of the view , is the idea that truth is to be identified with different properties in different domains of discourse. 1 Whilst we operate with a univocal concept of truth, and a uniform truth predicate, the thought is that the truth property changes from one domain to the next. So the truth property for talk about the nature and state of the material world may be different from the truth property for moral discourse .Tappolet (...) challenged alethic pluralism by asking how it can account for the truth of mixed compounds, such as a mixed conjunction like ‘this cat is wet and funny’, where each of the conjuncts are from different domains of discourse, and thus assessable in terms of different truth properties. She argues that the alethic pluralist is left in a dilemma: either admit of a ‘generic’ truth property, which can be possessed by propositions from all domains, thus rendering the plural ways of being true obsolete, or deny the truth of mixed conjunctions.In Edwards 2008, I argued that there is route out of Tappolet's dilemma. Briefly, I suggested that we acknowledge that the truth of a mixed conjunction is dependent on the truth of its conjuncts, and we should explain the truth of the conjunction by saying that it is true just in case each of its conjuncts is true. This, I argued, gives us an account of the truth of the conjunction without needing to appeal to a troublesome ‘generic’ truth property.Aaron Cotnoir criticizes my solution to Tappolet's problem. Cotnoir argues that my solution to the problem admits of an unacceptable ‘proliferation’ of truth properties, and smuggles in a generic truth property. I …. (shrink)

For the first time Truth: A Contemporary Reader brings together essays that have shaped two aspects of a fundamental philosophical topic: the nature of truth and the value of truth. -/- Featuring 22 essays, this up-to-date reader includes seminal work by leading figures in contemporary analytic philosophy. It charts the development of the central 'grand proposals' about the nature of truth, and subsequently how their influence gradually diminished in face of new theories developed in the 20th and 21st-centuries. The reader (...) also demonstrates how truth is often taken to be valuable in various ways, in particular as the norm of correctness for belief and assertion, and the relationship between truth and other epistemic values. -/- With introductory overviews to each group of related papers complemented by guides to further reading, this reader introduces the central debates, familiarizes students with the most important work in the field and covers pivotal theories of truth including: -/- - correspondence theories - coherentism, pragmatism, verificationism - deflationary, primitivist, and pluralist theories -/- Moreover, by showing how thoughts about truth and value bear heavily on one another, Truth: A Contemporary Reader provides new opportunities for understanding and advancing the link between these central topics. This is an essential collection for anyone studying or working in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language today. (shrink)

This paper discusses the predicament of Oscar Pistorius. He is a Paralympic gold medallist who wishes to participate in the Olympics in Beijing in 2008. Following a brief introductory section, the paper discusses the arguments that could be, and have been, deployed against his participation in the Olympics, should he make the qualifying time for his chosen event (400m). The next section discusses a more hypothetical argument based upon a specific understanding of the fair opportunity rule. According to this, there (...) may be a case for allowing Pistorius to compete even if he should fail to make the official qualifying time. The final part of the paper reviews the situation at the time of writing and offers some assessment of the strategy of the IAAF in responding to it. It is argued below that the proper focus for assessment of Pistorius's eligibility to compete should not be on whether his blades lead to his having an unfair advantage over his competitors, but instead should focus on whether what he does counts as running. (shrink)

This book looks at how the notion of the learning society has developed over the years, and how, and why, flexibility has become a more central concept in much policy and academic debate.

In the years 2020–2021, journalists, lawyers, scholars, and civil society actors noticed an unusual spike in the refusal of francophone African immigrants in Québec, Canada. While Immigration, refugee and citizenship Canada’s systemic racism problem were already documented, the novelty appeared to be how standardized and sometimes, “nonsensical” the reasons given to many of the applicants were. This eventually prompted a lawsuit against IRCC in which it was revealed that a new piece of software called “Chinook” had been deployed since 2018, (...) approximately at the same time application refusal started spiking. Online and media-fueled speculations culminated in a broad debate about whether Chinook was an artificial intelligence-based technology. Such controversy, for instance, unfolded during parliamentary consultations in which it was finally disclosed that Chinook was not AI per se., but more of a half-baked automated interface. The present article aims to understand how the performative ambiguity of Chinook informs on the progressive becoming of the Canadian Federal state and its immigration control practices in the current Machine Learning hype. Furthermore, it seeks to understand how the interlacing of public–private partnership, in which the private sector is mobilized to produce AI-driven technology, recursively transforms the exercise of governance and governmentality. We argue, through the Chinook controversy and its unfolding, that there is a shift occurring where AI becomes ever more central in statecraft “anarchitecture” and cybernetic adaptability. (shrink)

What is truth? What precisely is it that truths have that falsehoods lack? Pluralists about truth (or “alethic pluralists”) tend to answer these questions by saying that there is more than one way for a proposition, sentence, belief—or any chosen truth-bearer—to be true. In this paper, I argue that two of the most influential formations of alethic pluralism, those of Wright (1992, 2003a) and Lynch (2009), are subject to serious problems. I outline a new formulation, which I call “simple determination (...) pluralism,” that I claim offers better prospects for alethic pluralism, with the potential to have applications for pluralist theories beyond truth. (shrink)

Released mid-November 2022, Galactica is a set of six large language models (LLMs) of different sizes (from 125 M to 120B parameters) designed by Meta AI to achieve the ultimate ambition of “a single neural network for powering scientific tasks”, according to its accompanying whitepaper. It aims to carry out knowledge-intensive tasks, such as publication summarization, information ordering and protein annotation. However, just a few days after the release, Meta had to pull back the demo due to the strong hallucinatory (...) tendencies or underwhelming performances of the model. This article aims to study, through a critical threefold argument, the potential impacts of LLMs once deployed in the scientific value chain. Our first argument is a technical one. By examining the technicity of Galactica, it is possible to explain the descripancies between its promotional corporate discourse and abysmal outputs. Second, by going back to debates in both computer science and computational philosophy on the automation of abduction, we argue from the epistemological front that LLMs indeed cannot produce strong abductions and, therefore, claims about the automation of hypothesis generation remains chambering. Finally, our third argument is a sociological one. By conceptualizing the scientific field through Nancy Katherine Hayles’ cognitive assemblage theory, we aim to outline the potential steering of science by LLMs, mainly through information ordering. The core of our argument rests on the assertion that excessive control on information risks contravening a certain serendipitous aspect inherent to scientific discoveries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian StudiesCaroline Edwards (bio)What does utopian studies have to learn from critical race theory, Black studies, and ideas of Black futurity? While utopian scholars have begun unpicking the colonial entanglements of utopianism’s origins (particularly as a literary genre grounded in pelagic crossings to the New World that have advocated slavery, extractivism, and eugenics to name a few notable examples across the utopian canon), (...) few, if any, have incorporated the perspectives, aesthetics, and theoretical work of Black scholars themselves.1 The following are a few brief remarks organized around keywords (in a nod to Raymond Williams, a fierce advocate of utopian thinking) that attempt to sketch an answer to these questions, with a focus on my own area of utopian study: utopian literary and cultural production in the contemporary period.ProgressWe might start by considering the literary utopia’s most prolific period, from roughly 1880 to 1915. In a deluge of utopian narratives, many of them penned by amateur writers, we find the emergence of a genre that is thoroughly [End Page 498] rooted in industrialized progress. Whatever their perspective on capitalism and waged labor, these works privilege advanced industrialization as the primary means to eliminate poverty and disease, thereby liberating workers into automated futures of post-scarcity abundance. Examples include Edward Bellamy’s highly rationalized system of pneumatic delivery (Looking Backward: 2000–1887 [1888]), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s chemical production of food from waste products (Mizora: A World of Women [1890] 1999), H. G. Wells’s titanic hydro-powered engineering (Men Like Gods [1923]), Edward Bulwer Lytton’s lithic limitless energy, Vril (The Coming Race [1871]), or the ubiquitous electricity that powers Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s clean city (New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future [1899] 2011), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Marchant’s advanced Martian society (Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance [1893]), and Alexander Bogdanov’s advanced scientific culture on the red planet (Красная звезда [Red Star (1908) 1984]). Indeed, many notable dystopian novels begin with the same premise of highly automated societies that focus, rather, on the awfulness of life without purpose (Anna Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future; Or, Socialism a Reality [1887], E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” [1909], Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano [1952]). While they are far from uncritical of the telos of historical progress (most of the works highlight the class and gender inequalities of their own time), utopian novels in this period tend to view the utopian process as one of harnessing historical progress in a more equitable direction; they rarely question the Hegelian premise that history moves through contradictory forces in a dialectical series of stages.In his 2016 book Hope Draped in Black, Joseph R. Winters explores the lasting damage that ideas of historical progress have wrought on Black writers, artists, and thinkers. While notions of racial uplift are loaded with a linear narrative of Black progress such conceptions, he writes, “are mediated by melancholy, loss, and a recalcitrant sense of tragedy” (6–7). Building on Adorno and Horkheimer’s landmark critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as well as the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Winters notes thatmodern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed and problematic because they rely on and are intertwined with practices and conditions—capitalism, colonial expansion, racial hierarchies, endeavors, and incentives to usurp and possess that earth—that are harmful to non-Europeans, working-class bodies, women, and other groups.(2016, 8) [End Page 499]Examining the relationship between melancholy and hope in Black literary and aesthetic traditions, Winters explores how writers such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison incorporate jazz into their works, using its discordant, improvisational structures to imagine time out of joint (the Derridean deferral of justice announced by the arrival of the specter of old King Hamlet, who returns) (Derrida 1994). Here, Winters writes, “the past can always haunt and disturb the present [so that] the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility” (2016, 25). If we are to contemplate the almost overwhelming task of decolonizing utopian studies, then... (shrink)

The problem of mixed conjunctions, due to Tappolet (2000), threatens to undermine alethic pluralism by showing that it cannot account for the truth of conjunctions in which the conjuncts spring from different domains of discourse. In this paper I argue, firstly, that the problem is not just a problem for alethic pluralism and, secondly, that the problem can be solved.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental TraditionJeffrey EdwardsDavid Carr. The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 150. Cloth, $35.00.This book presents a response to contemporary attacks on the concept of the subject. Carr investigates the historical background to the criticisms of the "Metaphysics of the Subject" that are found in French post-structuralist thought (...) and in critical theories descended from the Frankfurt School. In explaining this background, he targets the widely held assumption that the history of modern philosophy can best be understood in terms of a fundamentally unified conception of the subject and subjectivity that unfolds inevitably from Descartes and culminates in twentieth-century phenomenology and existentialism. Those who share this assumption fail to recognize the significance of what Husserl (in the Crisis of European Sciences) called the "paradox of subjectivity," which derives from the necessity of understanding the knowing subject both as a subject for the world and as an object in the world.The origins of contemporary interpretations of the metaphysics of the subject are found primarily in Heidegger's thought. Carr thus devotes the first chapter of this study to the critical assessment of Heidegger's view of modern metaphysics starting with Descartes. For Heidegger, Descartes took over the dominant concept of substance from traditional ontology and transferred it to the human subject. The Cartesian subject, then, was revealed as an underlying hypokeimenon that absorbs or overpowers the world by reducing it to the representational contents of the thinking thing. Moreover, Heidegger maintained that modern thinkers did not go beyond the reductive conception of subjectivity intrinsic to the Cartesian metaphysics of substance. This Heideggerian judgment applies to the major modern thinkers. Even Kant and Husserl figure as representatives of a tradition in which "the knowing subject takes the role of substance; everything is reduced to first properties, whether as immanent in consciousness, object for the subject, or, as in transcendental philosophy, construct and product of subjective activity" (Carr, 31).In chapters 2-4, Carr argues that the Heideggerian interpretation is inadequate with respect to Kant and Husserl. In supporting this position, Carr emphasizes the close affinities between Kant's and Husserl's conceptions of objectivity for consciousness and between their portrayals of subject and self. Specifically, Carr argues (1) that both thinkers were committed to the representationalist view of cognition that is typical of other major modern philosophers; and (2) that both presented parallel, and indeed unifiable, accounts of the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical self.The key to explaining the fundamental agreement between Kant's and Husserl's transcendental theories lies in the concept of intentionality. There are, of course, significant differences between Husserl's phenomenological method and the procedure of inquiry into the possibility conditions of objective experience that Kant follows in the Critique of Pure Reason. Still, Husserl's portrayal of the intentional character of consciousness provides the basis for understanding how Kant's account of transcendental apperception and the original synthetic unity of self-consciousness grounds a non-representationalist theory of the subject's relation to a world of objects. Husserl's portrayal of intentionality also enables us to see how Kant's concept of transcendental [End Page 609] apperception allows for a description of the empirical self as something that is part of the objective world. Conversely, the Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the empirical self, or subject, sheds light on the sense of the distinction that Husserl draws between transcendental and natural reflection. In natural reflection, I "appear to myself as an empirical subject within a world to which I relate in causal-bodily and intentional [i.e., purposive]-motivational ways" (89). On the other hand, the consciousness of self at issue in transcendental reflection involves my awareness of the meaning-constituting cognitive accomplishments by which I am consciousness of the world as the horizon of possible objects and, at the same time, as something transcendent to consciousness.It is Husserl's conception of intentionality, combined with Kant's understanding of the transcendental-empirical distinction, that allows us to grasp the full significance of the paradox... (shrink)

As the model also suggests, however, the mainstream is not monolithic and is not maintained by a conscious conspiracy. The very efficiency of 'democratic' thought control is such that many individuals are completely unaware of the realities of the system by which they are controlled, and so perceive no danger in exposing that system to radical examination. For this and other reasons, damaging rationality and common sense do occasionally slip through the net.

Edwards, Denis Amid the wide consultation that is essential to the Australian Plenary Council 2020, it is also important to ask what theology can offer. In my view, a fundamental part of theology's contribution is an understanding of the Holy Spirit that can encourage the practice of genuine openness to the Spirit. It is already clear that this council will be an event of the Spirit. It will be an event in which the Spirit is invoked and in which (...) the Spirit acts. The question is: will we, who make up the church in this land, be open to the Spirit, and be faithful to the Spirit, in our contributions, responses, and actions? (shrink)

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was trained as a philosopher and steeped in the thought of Hegel and German idealism, but turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties towards politics, economics and history. It is for his these subjects Marx is best known and in which his work and ideas shaped the very nature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, Marx's engagement with philosophy runs through most of his work, especially in his philosophy of history and in moral and political philosophy. (...) In this outstanding introduction to Marx's philosophy Jaime Edwards and Brian Leiter begin with an overview of Marx's life and intellectual development, before examining and assessing the following important topics: Marx's theory of history: Hegel, dialectics, teleology, materialism functionalism and the causal explanation of historical change economics, history and the transition from communism to capitalism ideology, morality and religion human nature, alienation and the good life for human beings Marx's legacy and influence, including Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. The addition of chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms make this an indispensable introduction to Marx's philosophy. It will also be useful to those in related disciplines such as politics, sociology, history and economics. (shrink)