The sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women’s work in the home has been a problem that scholars have struggled with at least since the advent of the “second wave” women’s movement, but it has never entered into the primary discourses of political science. This paper argues that John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy provides innovative and useful arguments that address this thorny problem. Productive labor is essential to Mill’s conception of property, (...) and property was vital to women’s independence in Mill’s view. Yet since Mill thought most women would choose the “career” of wife and mother rather than working for wages, then granting that work productive status would provide a radical and inventive foundation for women’s equality. Mill, however, is ambiguous about the productive status of domestic labor, and is thereby representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought, as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender. But because Mill at the same time develops a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists, he offers contemporary political scientists and theorists a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor, the requirements for gender equality, and the accepted categories of political economy. (shrink)

Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book (...) seeks to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life. Thompson surveys ethical conflicts of public officials over a range of political issues, including nuclear deterrence, foreign intervention, undercover investigation, bureaucratic negligence, campaign finance, the privacy of officials, health care, welfare paternalism, drug and safety regulation, and social experimentation. He views these conflicts from the perspectives of many different kinds of public officials - elected and appointed executives at several levels of government, administrators, judges, legislators, governmental advisers, and even doctors, lawyers, social workers, and journalists whose professional roles often thrust them into public life. In clarifying the ethical problems faced by officials, Thompson combines theoretical analysis with practical prescription, and begins to define a field of inquiry for which many have said there is a need but to which few have yet contributed. Philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, lawyers, and other professionals interested in ethics in government will gain insight from this book. (shrink)

Interest in the contribution made by women to the history of philosophy is burgeoning. At the forefront of this revival is Mary Wollstonecraft. While she has long been studied by feminists, and later discovered by political scientists, philosophers themselves have only recently begun to recognise the value of her work for their discipline. This volume brings together new essays from leading scholars, which explore Wollstonecraft's range as a moral and political philosopher of note, both taking a (...) historical perspective and applying her thinking to current academic debates. (shrink)

What role did women play in the pre-industrial European economy? Was it brought about by biology, culture, social institutions, or individual choices? And what were its consequences - for women, for men, for society at large? Women were key to the changes in the European economy between 1600 and 1800 that paved the way for industrialization. But we still know little about this female 'shadow economy' - and nothing quantitative or systematic.This book tackles these questions in a (...) new way. It uses a unique micro-level database and rich qualitative sources to illuminate women's contribution to a particular pre-industrial economy: the German state of Württemberg, which was in many ways typical of early modern Europe. Markets expanded here between 1600 and 1800, opening opportunities outside the household for both women and men. But they were circumscribed by strong 'social networks' - local communities and rural guilds with state support. Modern political scientists have praised social networks for generating 'social capital' - shared norms and collective sanctions which benefit network insiders, and sometimes the whole society. But this book reveals the dark side of 'social capital': insiders excluded and harmed outsiders, especially women, to the detriment of the economy at large.Early modern European economies differed widely in their restrictions on the role of women. But the monocausal approaches that dominate the existing literature cannot explain these differences. This book proposes an alternative approach driven by the decision individual women themselves made as they negotiated a wide array of constraints and pressures. We are not only brought closer to the 'bitter living' pre-industrial women scraped together, but find out how it came to be so bitter, and how restrictions on women inflicted a bitter living on everyone. (shrink)

Dilemma in Politics underlines the major faults and fissures in the academic discourses around the themes emphasising upon the prevalence of 'dichotomy' between 'what ought to be' and 'what is' in the political sphere. How do the political values get marginalized, if not compromised, in the name of ideological conflicts and alliances? This book highlights this 'dilemma' across a range of themes which explore the gaps in the practice and the praxis of politics. The essays in this volume (...) present detailed analytical perspective on issues concerning environment, women empowerment and feminist discourses, identity-based politics, and its limitations, among various other key themes. Further it analyses the concept of rights in the neoliberal democratic context, caste and class politics and its inherent dilemmas and also illustrates the gaps in the political discourses to discusses possible alternatives or solutions. With contributions by eminent political scientists working on Indian politics, this book would be an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers of political science, political philosophy, public administration, governance, public policy, political participation, democracy, and South Asia studies, as well as be of interest to bureaucrats, policymakers, and the general readers. (shrink)

Gerda Walther identifies the possibility of we-communities that are non-intentional and have no intentional object. What is expressed, shared, communicated, and understood between lovers need not necessarily manifest itself in an objective, social, or communal form, as is the case, for example, in a political party. I argue that this non-intentional we can be experienced at the level of habit or affect, a level that is lived but which is not fully grasped in terms of the consciousness of meaning (...) and the relation between meaning fulfillment and meaning intention. (shrink)

Women most fully experience the consequences of human reproductive technologies. Men who convene to evaluate such technologies discuss "them": the women who must accept, avoid, or even resist these technologies; the women who consume technologies they did not devise; the women who are the objects of policies made by men. So often the input of women is neither sought nor listened to. The privileged insights and perspectives that women bring to the consideration of technologies (...) in human reproduction are the subject of these volumes, which constitute the revised and edited record of a Workshop on "Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology: Analysis by Women" (EIRTAW), held in June, 1979, at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some 80 members of the workshop, 90 percent of them women (from 24 states), represented diverse occupations and personal histories, different races and classes, varied political commitments. They included doctors, nurses, and scientists, lay midwives, consumer advocates, historians, and sociologists, lawyers, policy analysts, and ethicists. Each session, however, made plain that ethics is an everyday concern for women in general, as well as an academic profession for some. (shrink)

Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote what is considered to be the first major work of feminist political theory: A Vindication of the Rights of Women . Much has been written about this work, and about Wollstonecraft as the intellectual pioneer of feminism, but the actual substance and coherence of her political thought have been virtually ignored. Virginia Sapiro here provides the first full-length treatment of Wollstonecraft's political theory. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works (...) and treating them thematically rather than sequentially, Sapiro shows that Wollstonecraft's ideas about women's rights, feminism, and gender are elements of a broad and fully developed philosophy, one with significant implications for contemporary democratic and liberal theory. The issues raised speak to many current debates in theory, including those surrounding interpretation of the history of feminism, the relationship between liberalism and republicanism in the development of political philosophy, and the debate over the canon. For political scientists, most of whom know little about Wollstonecraft's thought, Sapiro's book is an excellent, nuanced introduction which will cause a reconsideration of her work and her significance both for her time and for today's concerns. For feminist scholars, Sapiro's book offers a rounded and unconventional analysis of Wollstonecraft's thought. Written with considerable charm and verve, this book will be the starting point for understanding this important writer for years to come. (shrink)

How does one arrive at a life in politics and policy? What happens to one's ideals when confronted with the reality that the only way to get things done in Washington is compromise? Who are the men and women who help shape our national agenda, and what drives their work? Dispatches From the Eastern Front provides fascinating, intensely personal, yet universal answers to these central questions. Recounting four decades inside Washington politics, Gerald Felix Warburg brings remarkable candor to a (...) most unusual memoir. An idealistic California baby boomer transported to the intimidating world of Capitol Hill policymaking at a young age, Warburg finds himself working to reform nuclear energy, strategic arms control, and foreign policy. As his access and power grow, greater challenges loom: how to maintain principles while cutting deals, and how to balance public purpose with private interests. An eclectic career reveals the slow and often painful development of emotional intelligence for work at the highest reaches of the public arena. (shrink)

Die berühmte Philosophin Hannah Arendt, deren Name heute in Deutschland Schulen, Straße, Institute und auch ICE-Züge tragen, wurde 1906 in Hannover als Kind einer jüdischen Familie geboren. Sie las Philosophie in Heidelberg bei Martin Heidegger, mit dem sie auch eine heimliche Liebesbeziehung verband. Nach der Flucht vor den Nazis 1933 über Frankreich in die USA wurde Arendt mit einem Schlag berühmt, als sie 1963 ihr Buch "Eichmann in Jerusalem" veröffentlichte. Sie machte sich über die Grundlagen politischen Handelns vor allem anhand (...) totalitärer Systeme Gedanken und hielt dabei stets betont Abstand zu allen Denkschulen der Linken oder Rechten.Diese Unabhängigkeit, die sie selbst gerne als "Denken ohne Geländer" umschrieb, ist laut Sontheimer eine der wichtigsten Ursachen für ein nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges wieder stark gestiegenes Interesse an Arendts Texten. Anhand des Lebenslaufs der Philosophin zeichnet Sontheimer ihre Denkansätze nach. "Das Hohelied der Freundschaft" überschreibt er ein sehr eindrucksvolles Kapitel über die intensiven, zum Teil über viele Jahrzehnte über hunderte von Briefen gepflegten Beziehungen der Autorin zu Zeitgenossen wie dem jüdischen Gelehrten Gershom Scholem, ihrem deutschen Lehrer und Kollegen Karl Jaspers und der US-Schriftstellerin Mary McCarthy. Am 4.12.2005 jährte sich der Todestag von Hannah Arendt zum 30. Mal. (shrink)

Aristotle is a political scientist and a student of biology. Political science, in his view, is concerned with the human good and thus it includes the study of ethics. He approaches many subjects from the perspective of both political science and biology: the virtues, the function of humans, and the political nature of humans. In light of the overlap between the two disciplines, I look at whether or not Aristotle’s views in biology influence or explain some (...) of his theses in political science. I show that we should not seek a unified answer to this question, for the relationship between the two disciplines varies depending on the topic. In some cases, e.g. the nature of the human function, the biological background is likely to be endorsed as one of the presuppositions of the ethical enquiry. In other cases, e.g. the study of social hierarchies, even though the ethical works and the biological works come to similar conclusions, it is hard to establish that the biological approach is intended to provide support to the ethico-political approach. In conclusion, I show that Aristotle’s political science and his biology are in conflict at least in two important cases: his account of justice towards non-human animals and his exhortation to contemplate. (shrink)

This review begins with a detailed focus on the Turnaway Study, which addresses associations among early abortion, later abortion, and denied abortion relative to various outcomes including mental health indicators. The Turnaway Study was comprised of 516 women; however, an exact percentage of the population is not discernable due to missing information. Extrapolating from what is known reveals a likely low of 0.32% to a maximum of 3.18% of participants sampled from the available the pool. Motivation for conducting the (...) Turnaway Study, methodological deficiencies (sampling issues and others), and bias are specifically addressed. Despite serious departures from accepted scientific practices, journals in psychology and medicine have published dozens of articles generated from the study’s data. The high volume of one-sided publications has stifled dialogue on potential adverse psychological consequences of this common procedure. Following a critical analysis of the Turnaway Study, an overview of the strongest studies on abortion and mental health is offered. This comprehensive literature comprised of numerous large-scale studies from across the globe has been largely overlooked by scientists and the public, while the Turnaway Study dominates the media, information provided to women, and legal challenges involving abortion restrictions. In the final section of this article, literature reviews by professional organizations are considered, demonstrating that the biased science characterizing the Turnaway Study is aligned with a pervasive and systemic phenomenon wherein deriving reliable and valid results via careful attention to methodology and scrutiny by the scientific community have been supplanted by politics. (shrink)

This book explores whether and how religious and secular worldviews and political ideologies held by scientists, citizens, decision-makers and politicians influence science as practiced and understood today. In this book, customized science is defined as a science built according to - or altered and fitted to - a particular group's specifications, that is, its needs, interests or values, its political ideology or worldview. It is science governed not merely by goals such as increased knowledge and explanatory power, (...) but also by goals such as economic growth, sustainable development, the equality of women or the end of religion. The contributions to this book discuss, with regard to particular worldviews and themes connected to the public role of science, whether science is increasingly becoming customized to fit the needs and interests of various groups in society, but also what the consequences of such a development may be both for science and society. (shrink)

How are we to grasp the genealogy of the “public intellectual”? When, how, and at whose hands did this term first come into use, framing an ideal of democratic responsibility for those who devote their work life to fostering knowledge and criticism—an image usually raised as a reproach to academic insularity though also sometimes assailed for encouraging an evasion of scholarly rigor? At first blush, the phrase seems redundant: the emergence of “intellectual”simpliciteris usually linked to a particular episode—the Dreyfusards’ defense (...) of the French republic—that already implied a commitment by writers, thinkers, and artists to political or civic action. From that time and place, the term traveled quickly across borders and before long to the United States, occasioning controversies from the start over who represented the “intellectual” as a social type and who did not, what activities or purposes best defined the role, and whether that role deserved respect, derision, or reinvention. To be sure, the social, cultural, and political world of “modern” societies has always featured individuals noted for scholarly, creative, speculative, or critical work that resonates with literate audiences attuned to key issues of the moment—whether such people were known as ministers,philosophes, journalists, poets, men or women of letters, Transcendentalists, or even, in some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century usages, natural philosophers or scientists. Nonetheless, the emergence of the noun “intellectual” from the early twentieth century, and its widening use since the 1920s, spawned a persistent and self-conscious discourse concerning the character, value or virtue of such figures. A skeptic might conclude that the addition of the modifier “public” has perpetuated old, tangled debates about intellectuals as such, without bringing with it much greater clarity. Words nonetheless are signs of historical troubles and social discontents. Excavating the usages of “public intellectual” over time can highlight some of the dilemmas that have confronted writers, critics, citizens, and political actors, past and present. (shrink)

To go through the pages of the Autobiography of Mario Bunge is to accompany him through dozens of countries and examine the intellectual, political, philosophical and scientific spheres of the last hundred years. It is an experience that oscillates between two different worlds: the different and the similar, the professional and the personal. It is an established fact that one of his great loves was, and still is, science. He has always been dedicated to scientific work, teaching, research, and (...) training men and women in multiple disciplines. Life lessons fall like ripe fruit from this book, bringing us closer to a concept, a philosophical idea, a scientific digression, which had since been uncovered in numerous notes, articles or books. Bunge writes about the life experiences in this book with passion, naturalness and with a colloquial frankness, whether they be persecutions, banishment, imprisonment, successes, would-be losses, emotions, relationships, debates, impressions or opinions about people or things. In his pages we pass by the people with whom he shared a fruitful century of achievements and incredible depths of thought. Everything is remembered with sincerity and humor. This autobiography is, in truth, Bunge on Bunge, sharing everything that passes through the sieve of his memory, as he would say. Mario's many grandchildren are a testament to his proud standing as a family man, and at the age of 96 he gives us a book for everyone: for those who value the memories that hold the trauma of his life as well as for those who share his passion for science and culture. Also, perhaps, for some with whom he has had disagreements or controversy, for he still deserves recognition for being a staunch defender of his convictions. (shrink)

Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging is the fourth path-breaking monography in the flourishing literature on egg freezing in just a few years. In April 2019, The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs by the renowned Australian social scientist Catherine Waldby, was published, the first book to examine the emergence of a global market for eggs through biomedical innovation. In September 2019, sociologist Kylie Baldwin of De Montfort University published Egg Freezing, Fertility and Reproductive (...) Choice: Negotiating Responsibility, Hope and Modern Motherhood, in which she explores the experiences of some pioneering women who are having eggs frozen in the United... (shrink)

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as (...) a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the constitutive role of national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain. (shrink)

Feminist science scholars need models of science that allow feminist accounts, not only of the inception and reception of scientific theories, but of their content as well. I argue that a "Network Model," properly modified, makes clear theoretically how race, sex and class considerations can influence the content of scientific theories. The adoption of the "corpuscular philosophy" by Robert Boyle and other Puritan scientists during the English Civil War offers us a good case on which to test such a (...) model. According to these men, the minute corpuscles constituting the physical world are dead, not alive; passive, not active. I argue that they chose the principle that matter is passive in part because its contrary, the principle that matter is alive and self-moving, had a radical social meaning and use to the women and men working for progressive change in mid-seventeenth century England. (shrink)

The letters transcribed in this book were written by physicist David Bohm to three close female acquaintances in the period 1950 to 1956. They provide a background to his causal interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Marxist philosophy that inspired his scientific work in quantum theory, probability and statistical mechanics. In his letters, Bohm reveals the ideas that led to his ground breaking book Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. The political arguments as well as the acute personal problems (...) contained in these letters help to give a rounded, human picture of this leading scientist and twentieth century thinker. (shrink)

"Hannah Arendt war der schwierigste Film, den ich je gemacht habe", sagt Margarethe von Trotta. Die grosse Denkerin Hannah Arendt fühlte sich.

Project MUSE - Journal of the History of Philosophy - Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Project MUSE Journals Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 E-ISSN: 1538-4586 Print ISSN: 0022-5053 DOI: 10.1353/hph.0.0014 Reviewed by Alice SowaalSan Francisco State University Patricia Springborg. Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. (...) xix + 372. Cloth, $80.00. Scholars have recently begun to expand research in early modern philosophy to include “minor” figures, especially those who contributed to the foundations of the scientific revolution. Simultaneously and separately, other scholars have begun examination of the female figures of the period. Prominent here are Eileen O’Neill’s series of articles, Jacqueline Broad’s Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century , and Sarah Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher . Patricia Springborg, a political scientist, now contributes to this literature with Mary Astell: Theorist of.. (shrink)

Has human nature been essentially the same since the evolution of Homo sapiens? If we could observe tribal forest dwellers from the Paleolithic period, would we notice more similarities than differences compared with contemporary men and women? Or has human nature itself undergone such radical changes over the course of evolution that we would have trouble finding anything in common with our distant ancestors? Political scientist Jeremy J. Millett tackles these tough questions and more in this sweeping overview (...) of society and human nature past, present, and future. Combining philosophy, political theory, and the evidence of evolution, Millett argues that people today are very different from human beings of the distant past. He notes research suggesting that our genetic natures have been changing since the dawn of our species. Hence, the human nature of the 21st century is not the same as that of the 100th century BCE. Nor will humans of some distant future era be the same as us. Both the continuously developing genetic basis of human nature and the many differences of environment and culture have produced and will continue to produce people unlike us. Millett examines successive periods of human development—tribal, feudal, maritime, urban, and today's emerging global society, showing in each case how distinctive human nature was in each time period. He concludes by projecting into the future, forecasting an age of "autonomous people" who have largely escaped the need for government and for whom cooperation is the norm. A work of great erudition and fascinating speculation, People Unlike Us raises profound questions about human nature and the future of our species. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:74 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer L. Holland “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust”: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement During the last three decades of the twentieth century, children across the United States regularly encountered adults who both hailed them as survivors of a holocaust and pleaded with them not to perpetrate one. These adults were not talking about war, (...) at least not in a traditional sense. They were talking about legal abortion. Children and young adults often heard this pitch in school presentations like one made in the mid-1970s by a California anti-abortion group, United Parents Under God, in which pictures of aborted fetuses (whose “feet will never kick a football... run on a playground... or play hopscotch”) and their imagined lost life stories were the centerpiece. Next to pictures of aborted fetuses were pictures of two prematurely born infants of color (the only people of color in the presentation) who were supposedly in danger under Roe v. Wade. With murder hovering in the air, activists asked their teen audience, “Is someone you love next?” According to these California anti-abortion activists, young people were physically and intellectually vulnerable to pro-choice views because they inhabited “atheistic” classrooms “where evil can no longer be called ‘evil.’” “You are quite literally ‘trapped’ in a completely ‘pagan’ situation in our secular society and schools and we must reach you anyway we can,” they continued. In the so-called “pro-life” worldview, liberals were brainwashing children and young people through the media, public schools, and many other institutions. Jennifer L. Holland 75 “Women’s liberal abortion speakers,” political scientists, “who typically work for the STATE” and for whom the “ends justify the means,” and new “secular-science textbooks”—all were trying to frighten teenagers to “into killing [their] OWN OFFSPRING,” activists said. Anti-abortion women, “ordinary women... who LOVE you” according to the California presentation, sought to protect children while feminist “witches... distort [ed] God’s purposes of sexuality.”1 In order to counteract what they viewed as corruption, anti-abortion activists had to wage a counter -battle, politicizing children in order to make them innocent again. In practice, that meant bringing the abortion wars—with their attendant graphic imagery and discussions of immorality, murder, and “holocausts ”—into the haven of childhood. From the movement’s early days, anti-abortion activists waged their fight in the name of innocent young people; abortion, they said, was a genocide of children. While these activists were certainly not the only US movement to use the supposed vulnerability of children to elicit public support for their cause, they also did something different. For the anti-abortion movement, children and young adults were more than just endangered innocents; they were also potential perpetrators. Young people, it seemed, were more liberal than their elders, having allegedly been reared in and indoctrinated by liberal culture. They seemed, in short, to be a potentially pro-choice generation. Thus, adult activists spoke more to and about young people at the end of the century. Adults needed young people to speak for fetuses as “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” but they also needed to convert and save America through them. The anti-abortion narrative of childhood vulnerability offered the restoration of social hierarchies as a solution to the problem of abortion. It was “women’s liberal abortion speakers” and feminist “witches” who were the sources of societal indoctrination. Pro-choice women separated sex and reproduction, thus undermining women’s role in society and changing their relationships with men. More subtly, anti-abortion 1. United Parents Under God, “That They May Live: A Presentation on Abortion,” n.d., folder 1, United Parents Under God Ephemeral Materials, Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. This publication was probably created in the early to mid-1970s because the few citations contained within are from between 1970 and 1973. 76 Jennifer L. Holland activists—who were almost always white—mourned the loss of past racial hierarchies while also envisioning theirs as a civil rights movement. In the California presentation mentioned above, activists explicitly compared abortion to mandated... (shrink)

As a feminist updating of Foucauldian analysis, the article makes the point that ‘the lesbian’ was not significantly exposed or seriously interpellated by Danish official discourse until the political debate on new reproductive technologies and reprogenetics accelerated at the end of the 20th century. In the 1990s, the debate thus constructed ‘the lesbian’ not only as an ‘unnatural mother’, but also as heiress to the monstrous figure of the ‘mad scientist’ whose tampering with the embryo had stirred the (...) class='Hi'>political mind in the previous decade. Deeply worried by developments in biotechnology, many politicians felt they should protect the embryo from this sinister scientist, and, subsequently, the innocent child from the monstrous lesbian. Hence, a majority of MPs voted for excluding lesbians and single women from access to assisted reproduction in medical clinics. (shrink)

Every day consumers use and purchase products whose supply chains begin with natural resources in countries plagued by widespread human rights deficits. Many economists and political scientists argue that there is a resource curse: those countries which possess valuable natural resources, especially oil, natural gas, and minerals, are prone to authoritarianism, civil war, and economic mismanagement. The combination of these two empirical facts—that consumers indirectly purchase resources from countries plagued with human rights abuses, and that these abuses are (...) systematically correlated with dependence on natural resource exports—has recently led philosophers to argue that consumers, corporations, and the governments that represent them bear some moral responsibility for human rights deficits in resource exporting countries. I agree. However, analyses of the resource curse rarely mention gender. This masks the gendered aspects of the harms that result from the natural resource trade. First, there is a high correlation between dependence on natural resource exports and gender inequality. Second, the commonly recognized resource curses—of authoritarianism, civil war, and economic mismanagement --result in gender specific harms. If these empirical assertions are correct, consumers, corporations, and the governments that represent them bear some moral responsibility for the foreseeable, avoidable gender-specific injustice that many women and some men suffer as a result of the resource curse. After reviewing the causal and moral links between natural resources and gender inequality, I consider a range of proposed reforms to the resource curse, and argue that integrating gender into these reforms will help create enabling conditions for women’s rights movements to move from the resource ‘curse’ to opportunity and equality. (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. (...) INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

National identity and attachment to national culture have taken root even in this era of globalization. National sentiments find expression in multiple political spheres and cause troubles of various kinds in many societies, both domestically and across state borders. Some of these problems are rooted in history; others are the result of massive global immigration. As US Secretary of State John Kerry tries to broker a new round of Israel-Palestine peace talks, the Israeli government continues expanding its settlements in (...) disputed territories. As this proposal is being written, Japanese citizens are debating whether their politicians should visit the Yasukuni Shrine (靖國神社), where the spirits of fourteen Class A war criminals from WWII and more than one thousand others convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are honored with a distinguished resting place. As the Chinese government’s plan to bring economic prosperity to the Xinjian province unfolds, ethnic conflicts between Han Chinese and local Uyghur Muslims intensify. Tibetans still demonstrate to the Chinese government, some through the dramatic sacrifice of self-immolation, their determination to pursue a Tibet that is truly free and autonomous. The recent inflow of Muslim immigrants across Europa and North America forces those liberal democratic societies to rethink the meaning of multiculturalism. Should the state respect Muslim women’s freedom to wear burkas in public? What about other aspects of certain Muslim traditions such as arranged marriages or the honor killing of teenage girls who see boys their parents do not approve? Since these immigrants voluntarily moved from their homeland to a new society, do they have a duty to give up such practices, which conflict with their new societies’ fundamental commitment to individual autonomy? Eric Hobsbawm suggests that nationalism is a contingent phenomenon in history—it arises with important historical events such as industrialization and print journalism; eventually, it will disappear. Anthony Smith, on the other hand, argues that nationalism is deeply rooted in the human need for collective faith and dignity. How should we understand today’s nationalism? Is it a transient phenomenon that eventually will be eradicated from the world, or is it a timeless issue that confronts and will remain a challenge for every society? Is the conventional distinction between civic and cultural nationalism still relevant or helpful? The problems and ongoing challenges of nationalism are very much alive throughout East Asia where the myth of ethnically and culturally homogeneous nations is still paramount. In addition to the examples provided above, East Asian societies are increasingly multicultural, inevitably forcing their governments to come up with new immigration and border-control policies, revisit their laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, socioeconomic welfare, and, more fundamentally, rethink the constitutional make-up of the citizenry and the ideal of social harmony, one of their most cherished political values. Nevertheless, contemporary theoretical analyses, whether philosophical or empirical, of the phenomena surrounding nationalism, in all its forms, are almost exclusively focused on cases in western cultures and societies, preventing the East Asian people from developing a coherent idea of who they are or should be in a way that can track their deeply-held values and norms (such as Confucianism). One of the primary aims of this conference therefore is to address this ongoing neglect and explore new concepts and theories that are socially relevant in East Asia. Not only will this provide access to the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism throughout East Asia but it will bring to bear philosophical concepts, approaches, and styles of reasoning about them that currently are not part of this critical debate. Providing an opportunity to hear these distinct and different East Asian voices and opening up these conceptual and methodological resources to scholars around the world will greatly advance the understanding and appreciation of nationalism. In addition to this primary aim, the proposed conference will achieve two other, novel, and important goals. First, by design, it will bring to bear a multi and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of nationalism. We are not privileging either conceptual or empirical studies in the organization of our conference and will bring together philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and historians, making every effort to invite scholars who explicitly employ or are interested in exploring different and at times hybrid approaches. Second, we will draw together scholars from around the world: China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, North America, and Europe, including leading figures in the field, who will serve as keynote speakers for the conference. Combining these two additional goals will enable us to organize a uniquely diverse conference, both in terms of intellectual discipline and national origin. Along with our primary aim of introducing East Asian voices and theories, this will make our event original, distinctive, and unprecedented in value. Our age is one in which it is unavoidable for people of different cultural backgrounds to live together in many different places. For the sake of justice and stability, a comprehensive re-examination of nationalism is both urgent and necessary. (shrink)

'A wonderfully assured and utterly riveting biography that captures not only the much-maligned Machiavelli, but also the spirit of his time and place. A monumental achievement.' - Jessie Childs, author of God's Traitors. 'A notorious fiend', 'generally odious', 'he seems hideous, and so he is.' Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he (...) not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas? Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father's penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher's hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli's life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works. As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee's gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli's world - and his work - more completely than ever before. (shrink)

Originally, the idea of interviewing Iris Marion Young in Barcelona came about after she accepted an invitation to give a public lecture at the Law School of Pompeu Fabra University in May 2002. I had first met Iris back in 1999, at a conference in Bristol, England, and I was impressed deeply by her personality and ideas. We kept in touch since then and exchanged papers and ideas. She was very keen to come to Spain (it seems that her mother (...) had lived some years in Mallorca) and she finally travelled to Barcelona with her husband and daughter in spring 2002. The lecture, which she entitled "Women, War, and Peace," was meant to be the closing session of a course on Gender and the Law, and was also part of a series of seminars annually organized by the legal philosophy department (the Albert Calsamiglia Seminar). Her work was quite well-known among several Catalan philosophers and political scientists and professor Angel Castiñeira-who, at the time, was the director of Idees (Ideas), a Catalan journal published by the Centre d'Estudis de Temes Contemporanis (Center for the Study of Contemporary Issues)-suggested that she could give a second lecture, which they would publish together with an interview I could prepare. She accepted both proposals, and I started to think of a questionnaire for the interview while I was at Queen's University in Canada earlier that year. Idil Boran, a philosopher and good friend who did her doctorate at Queen's, offered to help me with this endeavour, since she also admired Iris as both a scholar and a person. Together we prepared the questions and sent them to her once she was back in Chicago, as there was not time to conduct the interview in person while she was in Barcelona. In fall 2002, she sent some answers to our questions, but the document was unfortunately incomplete. She was busy at the time, so we didn't want to pressure her to finish the interview. Eventually, the editors of Idees decided to publish the manifest about the war in Iraq subscribed by a large number of American Intellectuals together with fragments of Iris's (antiwar) lectures and an article that she wrote together with Daniel Archibugi, "Envisioning a Global Rule of Law." The interview was thus left unpublished. Both Idil and I thought it would be worthwhile to publish it somewhere else, but, for one reason or another, Iris didn't have the time to complete it and we kept postponing the project. At some point, she said that the questions she left unanswered were too complex or challenging to give a short or quick answer, and that she would need to reflect on them to provide detailed responses. Later, we learned she was ill and we didn't feel it was right to insist on those questions being answered. The issue came up again when she accepted to participate as a keynote speaker at the World Congress of Legal Philosophy held in Granada in June 2005. She then said she would come first to Barcelona (where she and Nancy Fraser had been invited to a workshop by the Catalan Women Institute) and suggested we could sit in a cafe and talk about the issues left out in those unanswered questions. Unfortunately, she had to cancel this trip because of her medical treatment, and I did not have the privilege of sharing time with her again. The following series of questions and responses are the product of this rather extended interview process. (shrink)

I work at a research institute where the staff spends its time thinking about ethical issues that arise with progress in medicine, the life sciences, and technology. After such thinking, we make public policy recommendations. We pride ourselves in the diversity of our staff: there is a doctor, a lawyer, a linguistic anthropologist, a political scientist, a theologian, some philosophers, and so on. Both men and women do research and we are religiously diverse: Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and atheists.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Occupy Religion:Theology of the Multitude and Interreligious DialogueJoerg RiegerOne of the big questions for the present is how to bring the different liberation movements together. The different liberation theologies, as is well known, have addressed various forms of oppression along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other factors. What is it that brings us together without erasing our differences? This question has important implications for interreligious (...) dialogue, as we shall see.In our book Occupy Religion Kwok Pui-lan and I use the term “multitude” to reflect on unity and difference.1 This term, made prominent by political scientists and philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,2 has deep roots in our theological traditions. Several decades ago, Korean Minjung theology noted the prominence of the notion of the multitude (this is how the term minjung can be translated into English) in the Bible. In the Gospels, the so-called ochlos (the Greek term for the masses or the common people) does not describe only the ones who are the recipients of Jesus’ transformative ministry; the ochlos also describes the participants in it and the agents of change. In addition, our Latin American colleagues have highlighted the importance of Greek term laos in the biblical traditions, which is also used to designate the common people rather than the elites.There is a distinct difference between the Greek notions of democracy and laocracy or ochlocracy. Democracy describes the rule of the demos, which is constituted by the elite citizens of a city-state. Lower-class citizens, women, and slaves are not part of this rule. Laocracy and ochlocracy, on the other hand, describe the rule of the common people, including the proverbial “least of these” of which Jesus speaks frequently. These common people include all those who have been and are being marginalized on the basis of their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. In the ministry of Jesus, which is informed by the ministry of Moses, Miriam, Hannah, and the prophets, the common people are organized and become agents. God values their diverse contributions to life. In the world of laocracy and ochlocracy, there are different ways of being productive in the community, and all of them are acknowledged and needed. As Hardt and Negri remind us, the multitude is not the uniform entity of what has often [End Page 167] been called “the people” in various nationalisms or fascisms. Neither is the multitude the undifferentiated mass or the mob.3What brings the various liberation movements together, therefore, is not uniformity or a request to surrender difference. What brings us together is “deep solidarity,” the recognition that we are all in the same boat under the conditions of global capitalism.4 This insight is related to the topic of class, which has consistently been pushed underground in the United States but which has recently reemerged in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The now-familiar notion of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is a reminder that the majority of people are benefitting less and less from the neoliberal market economy. This includes even members of the middle class, as they have seen their retirement accounts dwindle, their job security take ever-more severe hits, their benefits erode, and their political power fade. Furthermore, the aspects of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity are closely linked to class, as they all increase the disadvantages of people in the neoliberal market economy, thus boosting the reality of deep solidarity. Deep solidarity ties together members of the 99 percent across the lines of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, and it thrives on difference, as they can now work together and make use of their various opportunities and gifts.Deep solidarity differs from conventional ideas of solidarity, which were often based on the idea that those who are privileged place themselves on the side of those without privilege. While it is still possible for members of the 1 percent to place themselves on the side of the 99 percent, the majority of us are now part of the 99 percent, and thus belong to classes that have something to gain from liberation. Class struggle, as... (shrink)

This text examines the tensions and the dissonances in the relation between religion and public sphere in contemporary Brazil. Based on a Sociology and on an Anthropology of the phenomena of secularization and secularity, the purpose is to demonstrate the “porosity” of the Brazilian public/political system with the religious milieu. By applying a socio-historical perspective, the work attempts to understand how the boundaries between religion and politics were precariously constructed throughout the constitution of our State in Brazil, without ever (...) having been institutionally well-delimited. This vacuum, which generated concessions on the part of the State to major Christian religions, guaranteed public legitimacy to their religious symbols in official state spaces, which are, in principle, neutral and secular. However, the 1988 Constitution represented the influx of modern and secular legislation that legitimized subjects of rights such as women, black people, indigenous peoples, LGBTs, environmentalists, etc. Given that background, this reflection aims at contributing to the interpretation of the complexity involved in the multiple and contradictory presence – in the public sphere – of both major Christian religions – which are based on an agenda of conservative religious values – and liberal and libertarian projects organized by segments of civil society and public agents, which generate tensions and dissonances. To understand this reality – as a mosaic of interactions and antagonisms –, we work with the notion of “pluri-confessionality” of Mexican sociologist Roberto Blancarte and also with the notions of secularity of “recognition” and of “integration” of French political scientist Philippe Portier. Hence, we attempt to reach theoretically and empirically a broader and nuanced understanding of our public-political system in the relation with the religious dimension. (shrink)

The role genetic inheritance plays in the way human beings look and behave is a question about the biology of human sexual reproduction, one that scientists connected with the Human Genome Project dashed to answer before the close of the twentieth century. This is also a question about politics, and, it turns out, poetry, because, as the example of Lucretius shows, poetry is an ancient tool for the popularization of science. "Popularization" is a good word for successful efforts to (...) communicate elite science to non-scientists in non-technical languages and media. According to prominent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, "sexual dominance is a human universal." He meant, of course, that men dominate women. Like sociobiology, genetic science is freighted with politics, including gender politics. Scientists have gender perspectives that may color what they "see" in nature. As the late Susan Okin Miller suggested in an unpublished paper tracing the detrimental impact of Aristotle's teleology on Western thought, scientists accustomed to thinking that men naturally dominate women might interpret genetic discoveries accordingly. Biologists have good, scientific reasons to fight the effects of bias. One must be critical of how scientists and popularizers of science, like "Genome" author Matt Ridley, frame truth and theory. Ridley's "battle of the sexes" metaphor and others have a doubtful place in serious explanations of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics, Theory and the NovelLeon SuretteEthics, Theory and the Novel, by David Parker; x & 218 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, $54.95.David Parker’s stated purpose in Ethics, Theory and the Novel is to ground the value of “canonical works” of literature in the “ethical interest,” which each of them embodies in the meditation and exploration of “the clashes of moral value” (p. 38). He is self-consciously responding (...) to the strictures of neo-Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction which allegedly see “the canon simply as the repository of conservative values” and therefore reject it (p. 51). In order to demonstrate this capacity of imaginative literature Parker provides ethical analyses of scenes in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The book divides into two projects, since Parker also argues for the pertinence of ethics itself quite apart from the value of imaginative literature as a repository of serious ethical thought. Part one makes the theoretical case, and part two applies the theory.For the theory he takes as his champions Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, the late Australian critic, S. L. Golberg, and the Canadian political scientist, Charles Taylor. From Nussbaum he derives the claim that “literature can be moral philosophy” (p. 34). From Taylor he takes a triadic schema of Western [End Page 247] culture: Judeo-Christian-Kantian, Liberal-Enlightenment-rational, and Romantic-irrational-egoistic (p. 20) as the sources of our ethical thinking. Murdoch and Goldberg are deployed as predecessors in his own practice of ethical analysis of literary works. Parker’s claim is that imaginative literature exhibits the dynamic tensions of these conflicting ethical discourses.Parker’s discussion is intelligent and well-informed. His position is, in my view, perfectly defensible—indeed traditional. That said, this book seems to be as much a symptom of the malaise afflicting literary criticism as a cure. To this reader the theoretical portion is not faithful to any of his champions, but is a dog’s breakfast of “theoretical” postures gathered from Derrida, Cavell, de Man, Rorty, Foucault, and Frederic Jameson—as well as from those named above. The problem is not that Parker misunderstands or misrepresents their thought, but rather that he treats theoretical discourse as a flea market from which he can assemble pre-owned furniture for his own residence.The practice of literary criticism encourages such rummaging among other people’s belongings. It is appropriate for commentators on a literary work of art to select from previous commentary those observations and insights they regard as sound, and to reject or ignore those viewed as unsound. Nonetheless it is difficult to understand how a discourse which finds one leg in Marxist discourse, a second in Freudian, a third in phenomenological, and a fourth in Heideggerean or Derridean discourse can be expected to stand four square.Ethics, Theory and the Novel can be defended as an exercise in bricolage—and quite an impressive one in its own way. Like the handyman, Parker has cobbled together an ethicist criticism out of what is available or ready-at-hand in other discourses. But—as with many a home project—one can still see its flea market provenance. In his critical analysis of the novels, Parker shows himself to be a careful and perceptive reader. But I must confess that his ethical analyses seemed very like old-fashioned moral analysis of character motivation. I would not disagree with his claim that “an ethical vocabulary... is essential to the full understanding of the created fictional situation” (p. 191). However, his argument for a dialogic plurivocity in the ethical discourse of Western fiction is one that has been previously put by Mikhail Bakhtin from within Marxism. It is, I think, a serious oversight that Bakhtin is never mentioned—even though Parker’s position is distinguishable from Bakhtin’s in that his dialogue is between perennial ethical schemata and Bakhtin’s is between hegemonic and subversive discourses.Leon SuretteUniversity of Western OntarioCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This new book explores the interface between political philosophy and politics, looking at the effects of philosophical traditions on the contemporary relationship between women and politics. Analysing key concepts in political philosophy, the author illustrates how common ideas - entrenched in the development of political thought and practice - have become almost intractable 'truths' that continue to differentiate between the sexes in politics. Liz Sperling looks in detail at the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, (...) Mill, Marx, Rawls and Nozick, considering general themes to which they have all contributed - such as the state of nature, the state, markets, citizenship and representation. The focus then turns to the specific contributions of the philosophers that continue to influence the association of women to politics. These include an analysis of Greek classicists' establishment of andocracy, Rousseau's treatise on education for citizenship, and nineteenth-century ideas of equality. In conclusion, the themes demonstrated throughout are drawn together to show how they translate into contemporary policy on women in politics. Offering an original insight into the ways in which political thought influences political practice, this will be essential reading in a key area of politics, philosophy and women's studies. (shrink)

Thomas Paine's words were like no others in history: they leaped off the page, inspiring readers to change their lives, their governments, their kings, and even their gods. In an age when spoken and written words were the only forms of communication, Paine's aroused men to action like no one else. The most widely read political writer of his generation, he proved to be more than a century ahead of his time, conceiving and demanding unheard-of social reforms that are (...) now integral elements of modern republican societies. Among them were government subsidies for the poor, universal housing and education, pre- and post-natal care for women, and universal social security. An Englishman who emigrated to the American colonies, he formed close friendships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and his ideas helped shape the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. (shrink)

Science and engineering remain male-dominated professions in Canada and elsewhere. This is a disheartening fact for a society dedicated to providing equality of education and opportunity, and protection of the right to physical and psychological security of the person to all its citizens. Canadian women comprise 51% of the population, yet still hold down, on average, less than 10% of all jobs in the basic and applied sciences. Few women are found in the upper strata of the science (...) hierarchy, whether judged by income, by rank within the relevant professions, or by inclusion in the structures of government, industry, education or professional institutions which formulate science policy. The evidence is compelling that science as both power and knowledge is firmly located in white, Western, bourgeois, (compulsorily heterosexual) men's hands. (shrink)

ArgumentThe process of institutionalization of Political Science in Brazil was conditioned by the country’s position in the geopolitical scenario proper to the Cold War, strongly affected by the influence of the USA and, later on, by the military dictatorship experienced between 1964 and 1985. The first Brazilian professionalized political scientists were, during their youth, anti-Stalinist revolutionary militants. They had been financed by the Ford Foundation to pursue their PhDs in the USA. In this paper, I argue that (...) the north-American model of ideological war included governmental and non-governmental institutions. Among the latter, the FF played a crucial role because it had a lot of credibility in state bureaucracy and was able to captivate the potential copartners, who would benefit from its grant, even the anti-American ones. The FF was able to do so because it was keeping a distance from the bellicose image of the USA. In this way, because Brazilian youngsters were leftist, the FF was interested in financing their studies. And, because they belonged to the anti-Stalinist left, they were more open than the communists and wouldn’t oppose to exchange with the USA. (shrink)

The Indian philosophy of warfare remains terra incognita. Most Western commentators emphasize the underdeveloped nature of military theory in ancient India, while two American political scientists...

A discussion of women thinkers in political philosophy, and the nature of political inquiry --Provided by publisher.

In this article, I present the arguments of three republican women philosophers of eighteenth-century France, focusing especially on two themes: equality (of class, gender, and race) and the family. I argue that these philosophers, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy, who are interesting and original in their own right, belong to the neo-republican tradition and that re-discovering their texts is an opportunity to reflect on women’s perspectives on the ideas that shaped our current (...) class='Hi'>political thought. (shrink)