Amartya Sen argues that sectarian discord and violence are fueled by confusion about the nature of identity, including the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of singular social groups standing in opposition to other groups (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican, Muslim vs. Christian, etc.). Sen defends an alternative model of identity, according to which we all inevitably belong to a plurality of discrete identity groups (including ethnicities, classes, genders, races, religions, careers, hobbies, etc.) and are obligated to choose, in any (...) given context, which among our multiple affiliations to prioritize. While Sen’s model of discrete identity prioritization is a clear advance over single-factor accounts, it overlooks significant lessons about identity from over 150 years of scholarship by feminists of color. In ignoring the experiences of women of color, Sen’s model falsely assumes that identities are in-principle separable for the purposes of practical deliberation; and, in obligating individuals to make such identity-based “reasoned choices,” Sen’s model forces those with multiply marginalized identities to choose from a set of externally defined identity options, none of which sufficiently captures their experiences. (shrink)

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting (...) and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. -/- Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. -/- This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology. (shrink)

In most testimonial transactions between adults, the hearer’s obligation is to accord the speaker a level of credibility that matches the evidence that what she is saying is true. When the speaker...

According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea.

Develop your psychic abilities and raise your frequency with nearly one hundred easy-to-use yoga poses that activate your chakras.

New technologies from artificial intelligence to drones, and biomedical enhancement make the future of the human family increasingly hard to predict and protect. This book explores how the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics can help us to cultivate the moral wisdom we need to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

The widespread and growing use of new social media, especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, invites sustained ethical reflection on emerging forms of online friendship. Social scientists and psychologists are gathering a wealth of empirical data on these trends, yet philosophical analysis of their ethical implications remains comparatively impoverished. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how traditional ethical theories might be brought to bear upon these developments, or what insights they might offer, if any. (...) In attempting to address this lacuna in applied ethical research, this paper investigates the ethical significance of online friendship by means of an Aristotelian theory of the good life, which holds that human flourishing is chiefly realized through ‘complete’ friendships of virtue. Here, four key dimensions of ‘virtue friendship’ are examined in relation to online social media : reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life. Online social media support and strengthen friendship in ways that mirror these four dimensions, particularly when used to supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interactions. However, deeper reflection on the meaning of the shared life for Aristotle raises important and troubling questions about the capacity of online social media to support complete friendships of virtue in the contemporary world, along with significant concerns about the enduring relevance of this Aristotelian ideal for the good life in the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper develops a phenomenological defense of Ian Hacking's experimental realism about unobservable entities in physical science, employing historically undervalued resources from the phenomenological tradition in order to clarify the warrant for our ontological commitments in science. Building upon the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heelan, the paper provides a phenomenological correction of the positivistic conception of perceptual evidence maintained by antirealists such as van Fraassen, the experimental relevance of which is illustrated through a phenomenological interpretation of the 1974 discovery (...) of the J/ ψ particle generally regarded as evidence for the charmed quark. The argument then turns to address known problems in Hacking's account, demonstrating that his own instrumentalist criterion of the real is inadequately rooted in the phenomenology of perception, and as a result, passes over the true ontological significance of experimental phenomena. The paper maintains that the proper criterion, only indirectly related to instrumentality, is the distinctive style of the real encountered in perception: empirical pregnancy. With this notion and Merleau-Ponty's associated reversibility thesis, I show that the phenomenological tradition provides insights into the warrant for our realist commitments that have yet to be adequately acknowledged by philosophers of science. (shrink)

Habits and habitudes are peculiar in that they are both a condition of human agency, as well as one of its most significant hurdles. They open up the world by providing us with ways of being within it (e.g., how we perceive, move about, and generally orient ourselves in space). However, they also confine our worldly behavior given their repetitive and often predictable nature. This tension between spontaneity and repetition arises out of the two-fold temporal structure of habits – i.e., (...) the habitual body simultaneously directs us toward the future and the past. An understanding of this tension is generally important for thinking about how individuals can do things differently. More urgently, this work has applications in the treatment of addictions and other compulsive behaviors where the difficulties of disrupting habitual repetition are much more pronounced. (shrink)

Theory of mind, also known as mindreading, refers to our ability to attribute mental states to agents in order to make sense of and interact with other agents. Recently, theorists in this literature have advanced a broad conception of mindreading. In particular, psychologists and philosophers have examined how we attribute knowledge, intention, mentalistically-loaded stereotypes, and personality traits to others. Moreover, the diversity of our goals in a social interaction – precision, efficiency, self/in-group protection – generates diversity in the mindreading processes (...) we employ. Finally, the products of mindreading are varied, as well. We produce different sorts of mindreading explanations depending on our epistemic goals and the situational context. In this article, I piece together these different strands of research to present a broad conception of mindreading that is complex, messy, and interesting. (shrink)

"[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." —Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken (...) privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan’s theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern. (shrink)

The deeply imaginative structure of Dungeons Dragons (DD) can allow for players to explore the intricacies of gender and sexuality in creative and potentially radical ways. One would be hard pressed to argue that cartoonishly large breasts and skin‐tight leather skirts really allow for dexterous swordplay or quick getaways. DD liberates us from the limitations of our sex by making male and female characters equal in terms of abilities. The shyest of men can be the most outspoken of wizards, the (...) most honest girl can play the most unscrupulous rogue, and the pacifist woman can don full armor and fly into a berserker rage on a group of bugbears ambushing her adventuring party because, after all, bugbears are her species enemy and she just can't help herself when they are around. (shrink)

The responsibility gap, commonly described as a core challenge for the effective governance of, and trust in, AI and autonomous systems (AI/AS), is traditionally associated with a failure of the epistemic and/or the control condition of moral responsibility: the ability to know what we are doing and exercise competent control over this doing. Yet these two conditions are a red herring when it comes to understanding the responsibility challenges presented by AI/AS, since evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that individual (...) humans face very similar responsibility challenges with regard to these two conditions. While the problems of epistemic opacity and attenuated behaviour control are not unique to AI/AS technologies (though they can be exacerbated by them), we show that we can learn important lessons for AI/AS development and governance from how philosophers have recently revised the traditional concept of moral responsibility in response to these challenges to responsible human agency from the cognitive sciences. The resulting instrumentalist views of responsibility, which emphasize the forward-looking and flexible role of agency cultivation, hold considerable promise for integrating AI/AS into a healthy moral ecology. We note that there nevertheless is a gap in AI/AS responsibility that has yet to be extensively studied and addressed, one grounded in a relational asymmetry of vulnerability between human agents and sociotechnical systems like AI/AS. In the conclusion of this paper we note that attention to this vulnerability gap must inform and enable future attempts to construct trustworthy AI/AS systems and preserve the conditions for responsible human agency. (shrink)

The international community has long been affected by the political, philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the practice of tyrannicide, defined as the targeted killing of a tyrant. However, there exists no specific international legal instrument that concerns the practice of tyrannicide, rendering the legitimacy of the practice ambiguous. This paper aims to investigate the issue of tyrannicide and offers a number of speculative arguments concerning its legal-philosophical status. It finds that there are essentially two arms of international legal jurisprudence that (...) may regulate the practice of tyrannicide. The first is largely prohibitive and is based on the derived legal arguments against assassination involving the element ofperfidy, relevant extradition law, provisions in the Hague, Geneva and New York Conventions, and the prohibition on the use of force in the UN Charter. The second position, though far more radical and speculative, is more permissive regarding the moral legitimacy of tyrannicide. This position is based on arguments from the classical international theorists Gentili, Grotius and Vattel, contemporary human rights standards, the principle of humanitarian intervention, the duty to protect, and legal category of hostis hutnani generis. It is argued that though the vast majority of international legal principles are indicative ofthe illegality oftyrannicide, that the practice may nevertheless be philosophically legitimated under humanitarian principles. (shrink)

This study examines C.S. Peirce's repeated remarks between 1904 and 1909 characterizing Spinoza as a precursor pragmatist.

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments (...) and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition. (shrink)

Traditional theories of mindreading tend to focus exclusively on attributing beliefs and desires to other agents. The literature emphasizes belief attribution in particular, with numerous debates over when children develop the concept of belief, how neurotypical adult humans attribute beliefs to others, whether non-human animals have the concept of belief, etc. I describe a growing school of thought that the heavy focus on belief leaves traditional theories of mindreading unable to account for the complexity, diversity, and messiness of ordinary social (...) interactions. I present a few broader, more comprehensive conceptions of mindreading that take into account how stereotypes, character trait inferences, social biases, and more influence how we understand and interact with others. These broader conceptions of mindreading promise to be more empirically adequate and have fruitful application to various debates in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper utilizes Robert Smithson's philosophy as a kind of counterpoint, rather than refutation, to many of Hegel's convictions on the nature and function of art in world historical spirit.

The ability of medical science to clone and perhaps even predetermine characteristics of certain species conflicts dramatically with many claims of the religious establishment. Opening with a description of various developments in plant, animal, and human genetics, Made in Whose Image? highlights the progress genetic research has achieved, its future promise, and its social impact. The developments are analyzed from the perspective of Christian ethics, as expounded by Roman Catholic and Protestant theorists, to give an overview of crucial ethical issues. (...) In reviewing the advances of genetic research, noted religion and ethics professor Thomas A. Shannon covers general ethical themes, such as the value of life, materialism, freedom, individuality, the concept of nature, and health and disease. In addition, he discusses problems in genetic engineering and misconceptions of the church. Shannon explores prenatal diagnosis, gene therapy, genes and behavior, freedom and responsibility, and the Human Genome Project. The book concludes with a powerful and groundbreaking methodological discussion of how to approach ethical problems in genetic engineering. (shrink)

"I found this a fascinating book: wide-ranging, readable." —Alison Jaggar Bell shows how the flesh-and-blood female body engaged in sexual interaction for payment has no inherent meaning and is signified differently in different cultures ...

In recent years, contemplative practices of meditation have become increasingly mainstream in American culture, part of a phenomenon that scholars call “Buddhist modernism.” Connecting the embodied practice of meditation with the embodied practice of democracy in everyday life, this essay puts the radical democratic theory of Jacques Rancière into conversation with the Zen writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Thomas Merton. I show how meditation can be understood as an aesthetic practice that cultivates modes of experience, perception, thinking, and feeling that (...) further radical democratic projects at the most fundamental level. Reading the landscape of Buddhist modernism to draw out democratic possibilities, we can understand contemplative practices like meditation as a form of political theorizing in a vernacular register. Buddhist modernism works as a practice of everyday life that ordinary users can employ to get through their days with more awareness and attentiveness, to reclaim and reauthorize their experience, and to generate more care and compassion in ways that enable, enact, and extend the project of democracy itself. (shrink)

Alongside the robots, rockets, kitchen appliances, and other technical wonders displayed at the great expositions and world’s fairs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, visitors frequently found deceptively staid demonstrations of banal bureaucratic tools: cards, fiches, and files. Yet these technologies of information management were aestheticized and presented as integral to the generation and pursuit of the fairs’ ambitious ‘world projects’: global networks, universal intelligences, efficient cities, colonized galaxies. The small, moving parts of information functioned as critical tools for city- (...) and world-building. In this article we begin with the 1964–5 World’s Fair, where bits and fragments of information fueled space-age visions, then trace those mid-century imaginaries back to the 1939–40 World’s Fair and a constellation of expos at the turn of the century, to see how the small, moving parts of information management ‘scale up’ to generate grand fantasies, and, at the same time, how they serve to index their own particular political and cultural milieux. (shrink)

Direct Social Perception (DSP) is the idea that we can non-inferentially perceive others’ mental states. In this paper, I argue that the standard way of framing DSP leaves the debate at an impasse. I suggest two alternative interpretations of the idea that we see others’ mental states: others’ mental states are represented in the content of our perception, and we have basic perceptual beliefs about others’ mental states. I argue that the latter interpretation of DSP is more promising and examine (...) the kinds of mental states that plausibly could satisfy this version of DSP. (shrink)

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn't always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital. (...) _Way Too Cool_ follows the hollowing-out of "coolness" in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and Community, and: The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of DemocracyShannon KincaidJoseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, and Michael J. McGandy, editors The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and CommunityNew York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 366 pp.Michael J. McGandy The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of Democracy Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 231 pp.I must admit that my (...) first encounter with the philosophy of John William Miller was not a pretty one. I first read of him in these pages a decade or so ago, and even though I was thinking a lot about pragmatism and democratic theory, and shared many of his interests, I didn't much like his philosophy. While I liked his style, the vocabulary seemed awkward. His finite idealism confused me. I had problems with his ontology, and his tendency towards historicism seemed odd. I even wrote an essay critical of The Midworld (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), though I never made an aggressive effort to publish it. [End Page 289]This is a good thing, because I would have regretted publishing that essay. I say this because both Michael J. McGandy's The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of Democracy, and the new edited collection of Miller's writings entitled The Task of Criticism, do an excellent job of revealing the contemporary significance of Miller's work. Collectively, they have convinced this skeptic that the midworld and its ontology of functioning objects are an important contribution to contemporary American philosophy.The Task of Criticism faces several challenges. First, George P. Brockway supervised the publication of five volumes of Miller's collected works, and Fell himself edited a 1990 volume on Miller's philosophy (The Philosophy of John William Miller, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), followed by Stephen Tyman's Decrying the Ideal (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Colapietro published Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom: John William Miller and the Crises of Modernity (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press) in 2003. Do we really need another volume? Second, Miller's brand of idealism is not very fashionable these days. Is there any hope that pragmatic idealism can inform contemporary social theory, and make a contribution to the very real and concrete problems faced by modern democratic institutions?I believe that the answer to both of these questions is "yes." Recognizing the importance of previous volumes devoted to Miller's philosophy, the editors present The Task of Criticism as the first comprehensive introduction to Miller's philosophy, and it attempts to cut a middle ground between a complete collection of essays and a "best of" anthology. The editors want to provide a framework for understanding Miller's philosophy, and in this attempt they succeed admirably.Why? Because the editors have provided a structure for Miller's thought that was lacking in earlier collections, and by focusing on the issues of philosophical method, historiography, and community, they have provided a framework for understanding Miller's philosophy. In so doing, they have also firmly established the continuing relevance of Miller's work. The recent revival of pragmatic idealism (as evidenced by a recent surge in publications on idealists like Royce and Hocking) is an important development in contemporary American philosophy, and I think Miller deserves a significant role in this movement.One of the things I like about this collection is its presentation as a work of three generations of Miller's students, all indebted to the work of Brockway, and all dedicated to the task of demonstrating the fundamental importance of Miller's work. The text itself not only includes a variety of Miller's writing on a wide range of topics, but also a very effective introduction to Miller's philosophy, short introductory passages for each essay, and a comprehensive index, as well as a bibliography of works by and about Miller. This is, in short, the first textbook of Miller's philosophy, and it does a fine job of capturing the breadth and depth of his philosophy.The scope of Miller's philosophical interests is made even more remarkable by the fact that Miller himself showed little interest... (shrink)

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities." Ralph Waldo Emerson What is the role of the urban experience in the construction of American democratic ideals? By looking at the disparate visions of a just society advanced by Jefferson and Hamilton, this paper will attempt to provide an account of the historical role of the urban experience in the construction of the American vision of democracy. Then, through the works of John Dewey and (...) Lewis Mumford (and Robert Westbrook's account of their continuing disagreements), the essay will address some of the issues stemming from the role of urban experience in the processes of moral development. Then, through the work of Whitman, it will be argued that the urban experience is a necessary condition for the adequate development of democratic ideals. The essay will conclude with a brief analysis of some of the important elements of the urban experience, and their respective contributions to the construction of democratic values. (shrink)

Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices.

This paper explores the ambiguous impact of new information and communications technologies on the cultivation of moral skills in human beings. Just as twentieth century advances in machine automation resulted in the economic devaluation of practical knowledge and skillsets historically cultivated by machinists, artisans, and other highly trained workers , while also driving the cultivation of new skills in a variety of engineering and white collar occupations, ICTs are also recognized as potential causes of a complex pattern of economic deskilling, (...) reskilling, and upskilling. In this paper, I adapt the conceptual apparatus of sociological debates over economic deskilling to illuminate a different potential for technological deskilling/upskilling, namely the ability of ICTs to contribute to the moral deskilling of human users, a potential that exists alongside rich but currently underrealized possibilities for moral reskilling and/or upskilling. I flesh out this general hypothesis by means of examples involving automated weapons technology, new media practices, and social robotics. I conclude that since moral skills are essential prerequisites for the effective development of practical wisdom and virtuous character, and since market and cultural forces are not presently aligned to bring about the more salutary of the ambiguous potentials presented here, the future shape of these developments warrants our close attention—and perhaps active intervention. (shrink)

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In this paper, I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophy of harm reduction. I begin with an overview of the philosophical literature on both harm and harm reduction, and a brief summary of harm reduction scholarship outside of philosophy in order to make the case that philosophers have something to contribute to understanding harm reduction, and moreover that engagement with harm reduction would improve philosophical scholarship. I then proceed to survey and assess the nascent and still modest philosophy of harm (...) reduction literature that has begun to emerge. I pay particular attention to two Canadian philosophers who have called for the expansion of harm reduction beyond the realm of so-called “vice”. Finally, I sketch some of the most interesting and important philosophical issues that I think the philosophy of harm reduction must grapple with going forward. (shrink)

This essay explores the political significance of two largely unexplored texts on American radio that Adorno originally composed in English after emigrating to the United States: Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory and The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses. Here, productively complicating the traditional image of him, Adorno translates his theory to a broader public in ways that reflect a desire to understand and inform democratic citizenship as enacted at the level of the everyday customs, (...) conventions, and habits of the people. Ultimately, Adorno’s writings on radio in the United States show how he tries to strengthen the substantive practice of democracy through a unique form of democratic leadership as democratic pedagogy that represents the practical enactment of an early version of negative dialectics. With this justification for Adorno’s complicated commitments to democracy in mind, we might begin to read him as a twentieth-century democratic theorist and productively turn to an unlikely thinker, not just to read a message in a bottle but to help us chart our current position and navigate our future course. (shrink)

Warrior cultures throughout history have developed unique codes that restrict their behavior and set them apart from the rest of society. But what possible reason could a warrior have for accepting such restraints? Why should those whose profession can force them into hellish kill-or-be-killed conditions care about such lofty concepts as honor, courage, nobility, duty, and sacrifice? And why should it matter so much to the warriors themselves that they be something more than mere murderers? The Code of the Warrior (...) tackles these timely issues and takes the reader on a tour of warrior cultures and their values, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the 'barbaric' Vikings and Celts, from legendary chivalric knights to Native American tribesmen, from Chinese warrior monks pursuing enlightenment to Japanese samurai practicing death. Drawing these rich traditions up to the present, the author quests for a code for the warriors of today, as they do battle in asymmetric conflicts against unconventional forces and the scourge of global terrorism. (shrink)