There is widespread agreement that there should be a principle requiring that artificial intelligence be ‘explicable’. Microsoft, Google, the World Economic Forum, the draft AI ethics guidelines for the EU commission, etc. all include a principle for AI that falls under the umbrella of ‘explicability’. Roughly, the principle states that “for AI to promote and not constrain human autonomy, our ‘decision about who should decide’ must be informed by knowledge of how AI would act instead of us” :689–707, 2018). There (...) is a strong intuition that if an algorithm decides, for example, whether to give someone a loan, then that algorithm should be explicable. I argue here, however, that such a principle is misdirected. The property of requiring explicability should attach to a particular action or decision rather than the entity making that decision. It is the context and the potential harm resulting from decisions that drive the moral need for explicability—not the process by which decisions are reached. Related to this is the fact that AI is used for many low-risk purposes for which it would be unnecessary to require that it be explicable. A principle requiring explicability would prevent us from reaping the benefits of AI used in these situations. Finally, the explanations given by explicable AI are only fruitful if we already know which considerations are acceptable for the decision at hand. If we already have these considerations, then there is no need to use contemporary AI algorithms because standard automation would be available. In other words, a principle of explicability for AI makes the use of AI redundant. (shrink)

(2013). Multiple paths to transfer and constraint relaxation in insight problem solving. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 96-136. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2012.742852.

With Artificial Intelligence entering our lives in novel ways—both known and unknown to us—there is both the enhancement of existing ethical issues associated with AI as well as the rise of new ethical issues. There is much focus on opening up the ‘black box’ of modern machine-learning algorithms to understand the reasoning behind their decisions—especially morally salient decisions. However, some applications of AI which are no doubt beneficial to society rely upon these black boxes. Rather than requiring algorithms to be (...) transparent we should focus on constraining AI and those machines powered by AI within microenvironments—both physical and virtual—which allow these machines to realize their function whilst preventing harm to humans. In the field of robotics this is called ‘envelopment’. However, to put an ‘envelope’ around AI-powered machines we need to know some basic things about them which we are often in the dark about. The properties we need to know are the: training data, inputs, functions, outputs, and boundaries. This knowledge is a necessary first step towards the envelopment of AI-powered machines. It is only with this knowledge that we can responsibly regulate, use, and live in a world populated by these machines. (shrink)

In the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen of which appear in English for the first time, Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy and discusses biographical matters not available elsewhere.

Within stakeholder literature, much attention has been given to which stakeholders "really count." This article strives to explain why organizational theorists should abandon the pursuit of "Who and What Really Counts" to challenge the assumption of a managerial perspective that defines stakeholder legitimacy. Reflecting on the paucity of employee rights and protections in marginalized work environments, I argue that as organizational researchers, we must recognize and take responsibility for the impact of our research models and visions. By confronting and rethinking (...) the foundational assumptions of stakeholder theory, business and society scholars can identify and pursue research questions that more effectively address contemporary social challenges. (shrink)

Misophonia is a condition characterized by defensive motivational system emotional responding to repetitive and personally relevant sounds. Preliminary research suggests misophonia may be associated with a range of psychiatric disorders, including personality disorders. However, very little research has used clinician-rated psychometrically validated diagnostic interviews when assessing the relationship between misophonia and psychopathology. The purpose of this study was to extend the early research in this area by examining the relationship between symptoms of misophonia and psychiatric diagnoses in a sample of (...) community adults, using semi-structured diagnostic interviews. Results indicated higher misophonia symptoms were associated with more clinician-rated symptoms of personality disorders, but not other disorders. Anxiety partially mediated the relationship between personality disorder symptoms and misophonia. These results suggest misophonia may be associated with a range of psychiatric symptoms and highlight the role of anxiety in this poorly understood condition. (shrink)

The concept of modularity has loomed large in philosophy of psychology since the early 1980s, following the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). In the decades since the term ‘module’ and its cognates first entered the lexicon of cognitive science, the conceptual and theoretical landscape in this area has changed dramatically. Especially noteworthy in this respect has been the development of evolutionary psychology, whose proponents adopt a less stringent conception of modularity than the one advanced by (...) Fodor, and who argue that the architecture of the mind is more pervasively modular than Fodor claimed. Where Fodor (1983, 2000) draws the line of modularity at the relatively low-level systems underlying perception and language, post-Fodorian theorists such as Sperber (2002) and Carruthers (2006) contend that the mind is modular through and through, up to and including the high-level systems responsible for reasoning, planning, decision making, and the like. The concept of modularity has also figured in recent debates in philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of language—further evidence of its utility as a tool for theorizing about mental architecture. (shrink)

Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as (...) ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that "the people reign over the American political world like God over the universe," unwittingly casting democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. According to Jeffrey W. Robbins, Tocqueville's assessment remains an apt observation of modern democratic power, which does not rest with a sovereign authority but operates as a diffuse social force. By linking radical democratic theory to a contemporary fascination with political theology, Robbins envisions the modern experience of (...) democracy as a social, cultural, and political force transforming the nature of sovereign power and political authority. Robbins joins his work with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's radical conception of "network power," as well as Sheldon Wolin's notion of "fugitive democracy," to fashion a political theology that captures modern democracy's social and cultural torment. This approach has profound implications not only for the nature of contemporary religious belief and practice but also for the reconceptualization of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Challenging the modern, liberal, and secular assumption of a neutral public space, Robbins conceives of a postsecular politics for contemporary society that inextricably links religion to the political. While effectively recasting the tradition of radical theology as a political theology, this book also develops a comprehensive critique of the political theology bequeathed by Carl Schmitt. It marks an original and visionary achievement by the scholar the _Journal of the American Academy of Religion_ hailed "one of the best commentators on religion and postmodernism.". (shrink)

This response to Dobson and White’s call for a feminine firm argues that such a concept is based on amisinterpretation of Gilligan’s research. Moreover, virtue ethics and feminine ethics do not share a common approach to nurturing relationships or the moral orientation of care. Acknowledging the worthwhile goals of Dobson and White’s endeavor, the feminist firm is presented as offering greater potential to achieve these goals.

Introspection admits of several varieties, depending on which types of mental events are introspected. I distinguish three kinds of introspection (primary, secondary, and tertiary) and three explanations of the general capacity: the inside access view, the outside access view, and the hybrid view. Drawing on recent evidence from clinical and developmental psychology, I argue that the inside view offers the most promising account of primary and secondary introspection.

Proponents of deflationism about meaning often claim that the principle of compositionality, when properly understood, places no constraint whatsoever on the nature of lexical meaning. This deflationary thesis admits of both strong and weak readings. On the strong reading, the principle does not rule out any theory of lexical meaning either alone or in conjunction with other independently plausible semantic assumptions. On the weak reading, the principle alone does not rule out any such theory. I argue that, though weak deflationism (...) about compositionality has better initial prospects than strong, neither version of the thesis is credible. In particular, weak deflationism cannot be maintained in conformity with the deflationist commitment to explaining facts about phrase meanings in compositional terms, that is, by appeal to facts about the lexicon. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness and social cognition are interlocking capacities, but the relations between them have yet to be systematically investigated. In this paper, I begin to develop a theoretical and empirical framework for such an investigation. I begin by describing the phenomenon known as social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. I then adduce a related phenomenon known as affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread (...) from person to person in social contexts. Experimental studies of these two phenomena suggest that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body – in short, that consciousness is ‘socially embodied’. In the second part of the paper I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I put these ideas together and show how they point to a circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness. (shrink)

Current research in moral development suggests that there are two distinct modes of moral reasoning, one based on a morality of justice, the other based on a morality of care. The research presented here examines the kinds of moral reasoning used by managers in work-related conflicts. Twenty men and twenty women were randomly selected from the population of first level managers in a Fortune 100 industrial corporation. In open-ended interviews each participant was asked to describe a situation of moral conflict (...) in her or his work life. The results indicated a clearly preferred mode of moral reasoning among the participants who described moral conflicts. Nearly all of these predominated with a justice orientation. These findings suggest that a correlation between gender and preferred mode may be context specific. (shrink)

In proposing that their model can operate in the concrete, perceptual world, Rogers & McClelland (R&M) have not done justice to the complexities of the ecological sphere and its invariance laws. The structure of concrete events forces a different framework, both for retrieval of events and concepts defined across events, than that upon which the proposed model, rooted in essence in the verbal learning tradition, implicitly rests.

Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009).

Prosody, in motherese as in all forms of language, has a very different form and a very different use than the central lexical, phonological, and syntactic components of language. Whereas the prosodic aspects of motherese probably derive from primate vocalization, this does not help us to understand how the more distinctive parts of language emerged.

This article addresses the important question of how “upper”-caste power is reproduced in contemporary India, in the face of organized challenges from below. It argues that this process turns on the reproduction of castelessness. A long-standing site for the cultivation of castelessness has been the postcolonial census, which has limited the enumeration of caste to certain nonelites for the purposes of affirmative action reservations. However, in the aftermath of an intensive campaign to include a full castewise enumeration in Census 2011, (...) the political leadership of the Indian National Congress Party conceded and reversed seventy years of census policy on caste. This article examines the institutional pushback within the executive bureaucracy in the year following the public concession to change census policy on caste. In doing so, it shows how bureaucratic actions and inactions reproduce both castelessness and upper-caste power in contemporary India. (shrink)

Debates about the modularity of cognitive architecture have been ongoing for at least the past three decades, since the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). According to Fodor, modularity is essentially tied to informational encapsulation, and as such is only found in the relatively low-level cognitive systems responsible for perception and language. According to Fodor’s critics in the evolutionary psychology camp, modularity simply reflects the fine-grained functional specialization dictated by natural selection, and it characterizes virtually all (...) aspects of cognitive architecture, including high-level systems for judgment, decision making, and reasoning. Though both of these perspectives on modularity have garnered support, the current state of evidence and argument suggests that a broader skepticism about modularity may be warranted. (shrink)

In response to Frederick’s exhortation to thoroughly examine the interaction of natural and cultural values, this article considers the mother-child paradigm proposed by Virginia Held and its potential for application to business ethics. The application of the model is done in two parts: the recognition of the centrality of the mothering person and child to our social well-being, and an application of the lessons learned from parenting to our civic roles and work environments.

How is ethical theory used in contemporary teaching in business ethics? To answer this question, we undertook a survey of twenty-five of the leading business ethics texts. Our purpose was to examine the ways in which normative moral theory is introduced and applied to cases and issues. We focused especially on the authors' views of the conflicts and tensions posed by basic theoretical debates. How can these theories be made useful if fundamental tensions are acknowledged? Our analysis resulted in a (...) typology, presented here, of the ways in which normative theory, and the difficulties within it, are handled in business ethics texts. We conclude that there is a serious lack of clarity about how to apply the theories to cases and a persistent unwillingness to grapple with tensions between theories of ethical reasoning. These deficiencies hamper teaching and ethical decision-making. (shrink)

The subject of journal quality has received little attention in the business ethics literature. While there are reasons for this past neglect, there are important new considerations which make it vital that researchers now address this topic. First, virtually all business school departments use evaluations of journal quality as an important indicator of scholarly achievement, yet business ethics has no such studies. Second, as many schools are beginning to ask ethicists to publish in the wider management literature, it is important (...) to find a way to compare journal quality across these domains. In the absence of such studies, performance review committees (including tenure decisions) may well make incorrect inferences about journal quality within business ethics or assume that ethics journals are not prestigious unless a candidate can provide evidence to the contrary (i.e. as in a study like this one). This study addresses these two issues. It relies on an opinion-based survey to establish journal quality by incorporating a list of journals within business ethics and the wider management literature. The target population is active business ethics researchers within the Society for Business Ethics (SBE). We present the results of the study and discuss their implications. (shrink)

In their exhaustive study of the cognitive operation of analogy, Hofstadter and Sander arrive at a paradox: the creative and inexhaustible production of analogies in our thought must derive from a “reminding” operation based upon the availability of the detailed totality of our experience. Yet the authors see no way that our experience can be stored in the brain in such detail nor do they see how such detail could be accessed or retrieved such that the innumerable analogical remindings we (...) experience can occur. Analogy creation, then, should not be possible. The intent here is to sharpen and deepen our understanding of the paradox, emphasizing its criticality. It will be shown that the retrieval problem has its origins in the failure of memory theory to recognize the actual dynamic structure of events. This structure is comprised of invariance laws as per J. J. Gibson, and this event “invariance structure” is exactly what supports Hofstadter and Sander’s missing mechanism for analogical reminding. Yet these structures of invariants, existing only over optical flows, auditory flows, haptic flows, etc., are equally difficult to imagine being stored in a static memory, and thus only exacerbate the problem of the storage of experience in the brain. A possible route to the solution of this dilemma, based in the radical model of Bergson, is also sketched. (shrink)

Nancey Murphy claims that a shift in “thinking strategy” from modern to postmodern modes of thought makes it easier to exhibit the intellectual respectability of theology vis‐à‐vis the sciences. Her case for this proposition depends on modernist interests, most notably in systematizing the sciences for reasons that have their origin in Plato's divided line.

The hatchet and the seed -- A tree with deep roots -- The critical tools -- A field crystallizes -- Destruction of nature -- Construction of nature -- Degradation and marginalization -- Conservation and control -- Environmental conflict -- Environmental identity and social movement -- Where to now?

Since its inception some fifty years ago, cognitive science has seen a number of sea changes. Perhaps the best known is the development of connectionist models of cognition as an alternative to classical, symbol-based approaches. A more recent - and increasingly influential - trend is that of dynamical-systems-based, ecologically oriented models of the mind. Researchers suggest that a full understanding of the mind will require systematic study of the dynamics of interaction between mind, body, and world. Some argue that this (...) new orientation calls for a revolutionary new metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes, and even persons, literally extend into the environment. This book is a guide to this movement in cognitive science. Each chapter tackles either a specific area of empirical research or specific sector of the conceptual foundation underlying this research. (shrink)

This paper addresses the intertwined issues of rising income inequality and food insecurity in the U.S. The ways that food security and insecurity are defined anddiscussed by the major agricultural companies are contrasted with the concepts and definitions used by food sovereignty activists. We argue that the hegemonic discourse of hunger and food security articulated and disseminated by the agricultural production companies, such as Monsanto and Cargill, contributes to, rather than alleviates widespread food insecurity. Local and regional food production offer (...) alternatives that enable low income people to control and optimize their food choices. (shrink)

The organizers of the 1992 Highlands Institute seminar were kind enough to invite me to comment as a neo-pragmatist on John E. Smith's keynote paper "Experience, God, and Classical American Philosophy." It is my pleasure to do so. I read portions of both GOD AND EXPERIENCE and THE ANALOGY OF EXPERIENCE when they were published. I was impressed then, and continue to be impressed, with Professor Smith's intellectually responsible and powerful defense of Christianity, carried out, as it was, in a (...) philosophical environment where that was not the most popular thing to do. More recently, in preparation for this event, I have profited from reading THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, particularly the chapters on James and Dewey. And, I can only second his presidential call in "The New Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" for a live-and-let-live attitude amongst the cacophonous multitude of those of us who call ourselves "philosophers.". (shrink)

Within Piaget there is an implicit theory of the development of explicit memory. It rests in the dynamical trajectory underlying the development of causality, object, space and time – a complex (COST) supporting a symbolic relationship integral to the explicit. Cassirer noted the same dependency in the phenomena of aphasias, insisting that a symbolic function is being undermined in these deficits. This is particularly critical given the reassessment of Piaget’s stages as the natural bifurcations of a self-organizing dynamic system. The (...) elements of a theoretical framework required to support explicit memory are developed, to include, (1) the complex developmental trajectory supporting the emergence of the explicit in Piaget, (2) the concrete dynamical system and the concept of a non-differentiable time contained in Bergson’s theory required to support a conscious, as opposed to an implicit remembrance, (3) the relation to current theories of amnesia, difficulties posed by certain retrograde amnesic phenomena, the role of the hippocampus and limitations of connectionist models, (4) the fact that nowhere in this overall framework does the loss of explicit memory imply or require the destruction of experience “stored in the brain.”. (shrink)

"The political and academic worlds are fractured by two competing discourses: the universalism of human rights and cultural relativism. This fracture is represented by the deep separation of cultural analysis and theories of international politics. Derek Robbins in a brilliant interrogation of European thinkers from Montesquieu to Pierre Bourdieu seeks to replace cultural relativism with cultural relationism as a step towards reconciling Enlightenment universalism and anthropological insistence on cultural difference. Inter alia he reflects on the tensions between political and (...) social science and takes up the challenge from Raymond Aron to construct a sociology of international relations. A dazzling achievement." - Bryan S. Turner, The Graduate Center, CUNY Through historical studies of some of the work of Montesquieu, Comte, Durkheim, Boas, Morgenthau, Aron and Bourdieu, Derek Robbins examines the changing and competing conceptualisations of the political and the social in the Western European intellectual tradition. He suggests that we are now experiencing a new ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in which political thought and its consequences in action have become divorced from social and cultural experience. Developing further the ideas of Bourdieu which he has presented in books and articles over the last twenty years, Robbins argues that we need to integrate the recognition of cultural difference with the practice of international politics by accepting that the ‘field’ of international political discourse is a social construct which is contingent on encounters between diverse cultures. ‘Everything is relative’ (Comte) and ‘everything is social’ (Bourdieu), not least international politics. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that moral behavior attracts more praise, and immoral behavior less blame, when the agent has suffered in childhood. In this paper we report results from three studies in which a fictional character’s childhood was described in terms of either neglect and abuse (Adversity condition), love and care (Prosperity condition), or neutrally (Control condition). In Study 1 (N = 248), participants in the Adversity condition attributed more praise to a fictional character relative to other conditions. In Study 2 (...) (N = 275), participants in the Adversity condition attributed more praise and less blame relative to other conditions, with the effects mediated by self-expressivity. In Study 3 (N = 275), where the character was female rather than male, there was no effect of condition on praise, but there was an effect of condition on blame, and this effect was mediated by self-expressivity and social-emotional impairment. (shrink)

This paper challenges the field to move beyond strategic philanthropy to a more encompassing concept of sustainable philanthropy. A brief history of philanthropic practices is presented, as well as a discussion of contemporary approaches to corporate philanthropy. The model of sustainable philanthropy developed here advocates integrating a triple bottom line approach with the strategic practice of corporate giving. It shifts the traditional model of powerful donor and a powerless recipient, to one where both donor and recipient must work harder to (...) identify a partner that shares their intrinsic values and objectives. The aim of sustainable philanthropy is to establish a working partnership with broadly shared goals and openly acknowledged benefits. (shrink)

Bergson's 1896 theory of perception/memory assumed a framework anticipating the quantum revolution in physics, the still unrealized implications of this framework contributing to the large neglect of Bergson today. The basics of his model are explored, including the physical concepts he advanced before the crisis in classical physics, his concept of perception as ‘virtual action’ with its relativistic implications, and his unique explication of the subject/object relationship. All form the basis for his solution to the ‘hard’ problem. The relation between (...) Bergson and Gibson as natural complements is also explored, with Bergson providing the framework that explicates Gibson's concept of direct perception, with Gibson's resonance model as a precursor to dynamic systems models of the brain and his reliance on invariance laws defining perceived events providing more detail for the mechanisms Bergson only envisioned from afar, and with Bergson providing the basis for an otherwise missing Gibsonian model of direct memory. (shrink)

This article builds on feminist scholarship on new biologies and the body to describe the temporal politics of epigenetic research related to the human placenta. Drawing on interviews with scientists and observations at conferences and in laboratories, we argue that epigenetic research simultaneously positions placenta tissue as a way back into maternal and fetal bodies following birth, as a lens onto children’s future well-being, and as a bankable resource for ongoing research. Our findings reflect how developmental models of health have (...) helped recast the placenta as an agential organ that is uniquely responsive to environments during pregnancy and capable of embodying biological evidence about the effects of in utero experiences after birth. We develop the concept of ‘recursive embodiment’ to describe how placenta epigenetics is reimagining relationships between bodies and environments across developmental, epigenetic, and generational time, and the impacts this has for experiences of pregnancy and responsibilities related to children’s health. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural scientific research has unmistakable parallels to phenomenology. These parallels are clear enough to allow one to say confidently that Goethe's delicate empiricism is indeed a phenomenology of nature. This paper examines how Goethe's criticisms of Newton anticipated Husserl's announcement of the crisis of the modern sciences, and it describes how Goethe, at a critical juncture in cultural history, addressed this emerging crisis through a scientific method that is virtually identical to the method of (...) contemporary empirical-phenomenological research in the human sciences. Goethe's practice of science shares with phenomenology a participatory, morally-responsive, and holistic approach to the description of dynamic life-world phenomena. Delicate empiricism has its own version of the phenomenological epoché, and, like Husserl's technique of imaginative variation, it strives to disclose the essential or archetypal structure of the phenomenon through the endowment of human imagination. However, a close reading of Goethe suggests that the tendency amongst some scholars to distinguish phenomenology as human science from the natural sciences is actually a costly error which unwittingly falls prey to implicit Cartesian assumptions. Goethe, however, manages to avoid these problems by performing from the first a phenomenology of nature's sensibility. (shrink)

It has long been assumed that the more modern we become, the less religious we will be. Yet a recent resurrection in faith has challenged the certainty of this belief. In these original essays and interviews, leading hermeneutical philosophers and postmodern theorists John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo engage with each other's past and present work on the subject and reflect on our transition from secularism to postsecularism. As two of the figures who have contributed the most to the theoretical (...) reflections on the contemporary philosophical turn to religion, Caputo and Vattimo explore the changes, distortions, and reforms that are a part of our postmodern faith and the forces shaping the religious imagination today. Incisively and imaginatively connecting their argument to issues ranging from terrorism to fanaticism and from politics to media and culture, these thinkers continue to reinvent the field of hermeneutic philosophy with wit, grace, and passion. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of the emergence of ethical relatedness, which is developed through a synthetic reading of the developmental theories of Melanie Klein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Klein's theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are found to roughly parallel Merleau-Ponty's distinction between the "lived" and the "symbolic." With the additional contributions of Thomas Ogden and Martin C. Dillon, the theories of Klein and Merleau-Ponty are refined to accommodate the insights of each developmental perspective. Implications of the paper's analysis (...) include: Opportunities to clarify key concepts in object relations theory, including projective identification; insight into the development of self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, embarrassment and gratitude; the articulation of a phenomenologically oriented object relations perspective which allows for human agency and therefore genuine altruism and compassion; and, finally, a validation of previous assertions that theory cannot and should not be meaningfully distinguished from ethics. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper describes our study of the emergence of social capital in a job creation framework called the Social Purchasing Portal (SPP), which has evolved over the past five years in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has spread more recently to several other Canadian cities. We provide an overview of the framework of the Social Purchasing Portal and the context in which the SPP wascreated, and define the concept of social capital. Our interviews of the SPP founders in five locations demonstrate (...) the importance of bonded networks within sector groups before attempting to build bridges between the civic and private enterprises. (shrink)

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more (...) than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse. (shrink)