Philosophy Commons^™

Citizenship, Insurrection, And Recognition: European Critical Theory Before The Biopolitical Threshold: Citizenship; Violence And Civility: On The Limits Of Political Philosophy; Recognition Or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter On The Politics Of Freedom, Equality, And Identify, Miguel Vatter

International Dialogue

Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth are representative figures of a generation of political theorists who stand under the shooting star of May 1968, the high season of insurrectionary politics in the last half century. The books under review offer a welcome opportunity to consider the lessons they draw from this event and its aftermath at the twilight of their careers. However, taken as a whole these books also reveal the limits of this style of radical democratic theory that only in a very approximate way has registered the passing of the baton, which occurred roughly during the same …

The Iranian Metaphysicals, Elise K. Burton

International Dialogue

Anthropologist Alireza Doostdar’s first book, The Iranian Metaphysicals, is a well-written and theoretically sophisticated contribution to scholarship on modern Iranian history and society. Combining vividly portrayed ethnography with archival research and textual analysis, he offers an unprecedented account of Iranians’ experiences with and beliefs about the supernatural. The term ‘metaphysical’ emerges directly from his Iranian interlocutors, who use the Persian equivalents metafiziki or mavara’i to describe paranormal practices and phenomena ranging from sorcery and traditional occult sciences, to spirit possession and séances, to clairvoyance and teleportation. Although many elite Iranians, secularist and orthodox Shi‘i alike, have condemned interest in the …

Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination, Eric A. Heinze

International Dialogue

Alexander Brown writes as an inter-disciplinary scholar at the intersections of law, ethics, philosophy, and politics. With Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination he justly claims to have explored “numerous principled arguments for and against hate speech law by articulating a collection of key normative principles” (316). This ambitious book identifies and organizes conflicting values within the hate speech controversies. It aims to synthesize deeper questions about core concepts of liberalism, democracy, personhood, dignity, and tolerance with policy concerns about pragmatics and effectiveness. The most seasoned free speech scholars will find points and angles they had not previously considered.

Humanity Without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, And Human Rights, David Jason Karp

International Dialogue

This book aims to reject theoretical approaches that ground human rights in a notion of dignity, understood in terms of an equal rank, transcendental/spiritual quality and/or human capacity for rational agency. It argues instead that the idea of human rights should be grounded in a fundamental moral right of each person not to be treated as inferior. It defends this argument with reference to a substantive account of what it means to be treated as inferior in the relevant sense—dehumanization, instrumentalization, infantilization, objectification and stigmatization—combined with an account of when and why these are wrong. The book says that they …

Heat, Greed And Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism And Sustainable Wellbeing, Gillian Brock

International Dialogue

In this wonderful book, Ian Gough shows how we can deal with climate change sensibly, by developing eco-social policy that promotes human wellbeing. The result is a tour de force. Demonstrating sophisticated knowledge of several relevant fields, Gough combines important multidisciplinary insights with his previous groundbreaking research on human needs. The result is a coherent, usable framework that has considerable value in guiding policy discussions. This impressive work is bound to become essential reading for anyone working on policy, climate change and sustainable human well-being.

Famine, Affluence And Morality, Owen G. Mordaunt

International Dialogue

The foreword of this text is significant because Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, make reference to the fact that in more than forty years the world has seen much improvement in curbing poverty. Less than half the world’s population lives in poverty and the proportion of children who die before the age of five has dropped even more. By 1990, it was around 10%, and now it is closer to 5%, even though 5% is still too many when you consider 6.3 million child deaths per year. Most of the deaths, however, are …

The Color Of Modernity: São Paulo And The Making Of Race And Nation In Brazil, Maria S. Arbeláez

International Dialogue

This The Color of Modernity is an outstanding examination of the role of race, regional, and nationalistic ideologies in the creation of modern-day Brazil. Barbara Weinstein focuses on the rise of the mainly white elite of the State of São Paulo as the prominent economic, political, and intellectual leader of the region and the country. The analysis articulates methodical theoretical approaches of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and politics of identity. It investigates the intricacies of how the coffee barons and intellectual Paulistanos managed to construct an image of modernity, entrepreneurship, and success as the paradigm of a new Brazil.What appears …

Heidegger And Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, David A. White

International Dialogue

This work is an anthology of fourteen articles on various aspects of Heidegger’s relation to the Jews and, more abstractly, what it means to be Jewish. The essays are arranged under three headings—Heidegger Thinks the Jews, Heidegger and Jewish Thinkers, Heidegger and Jewish Thought. The work also includes an introduction by Elad Lapidot and, as an appendix, Thomas Sheehan’s bibliography of Heidegger’s works (including English translations as of 2017). Lapidot’s introduction highlights the stimulus for the anthology, the publication of Heidegger’s “so-called Black Notebooks,” notes for the years 1931 to 1948. For Lapidot, “about a dozen passages” contain “strong anti-Jewish …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 8.

The Life Of The Law In Palestine: The Abc Of The Opt: A Legal Lexicon Of The Israeli Control Over The Occupied Palestinian Territory Orna Ben-Naftali,, John Reynolds

International Dialogue

Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood. (Cole 2015: 19) In September 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court confirmed that the planned eviction and demolition of the small West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar, originally authorized by the Court earlier in the year, should go ahead. The residents of that village are Palestinian Bedouin who had been expelled by the Israeli state in 1952 from their original lands in the

Naqab desert. Six …

Not Enough: Human Rights In An Unequal World, Andrew Fagan

International Dialogue

These are troubling times, in which we appear to be facing an ever-expanding litany of harms and injustices entirely of our own making. Our awareness of these pathological conditions is expressed through various critical perspectives and platforms, which together reinforce a pervasive sense of crisis. We all contribute to the making of our world in a variety of ways. Few of us can claim to possess entirely clean hands when it comes to accounting for how the world could have become so disenchanted and so unpleasant for so many. However, some may wish to claim that the very purity of …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 8

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’T Talk About It), Uğur Aytaç

International Dialogue

The demise of organized labor, the internationalization of capital movements, and technological changes are often believed to contribute to the decline in the bargaining power of employees vis-à-vis their bosses in the age of globalization. According to many, these radical socio-economic transformations are one of the explanatory factors behind the expanding income and wealth inequalities across societies. The emergence of these vast economic inequalities led social scientists to study the nature of these trends and search for possible institutional solutions. Similarly, the normative-philosophical discussions on the contemporary labor-capital relations have predominantly focused on the inequalities of economic resources such as …

Evidence For Hope: Making Human Rights Work In The 21st Century, Brett J. Kyle

International Dialogue

In Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century, Kathryn Sikkink delivers a timely defense of the promise and progress of human rights movements, ideas, and institutions. Amid a seemingly ever-growing body of scholarship on the shortcomings of human rights, Sikkink contends that the human rights movement has helped to improve the human condition over the long term. As the title promises, there is much we should regard as progress in human rights and reason to be hopeful for the future. Sikkink was motivated to write this book for human rights activists “who say they have lost …

Designing Epistemic Concepts, Luke E. Elwonger

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The analysis and theorizing about concepts like “knowledge” and “justification” has played a central role in much of epistemology in the past half century. This dissertation argues for the claim that we should understand this conceptual concern as one of design. Concepts are tools and the concepts of interest to epistemologists must be those that we can best use in service of our epistemic interests. On this understanding of the conceptual project, we determine the content of epistemic concepts, not by consulting our naïve linguistic intuitions, but by determining what concepts will best help us express and enforce the epistemic …

Lying And History, Thomas Carson

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

I begin by discussing views about the permissibility of lying by political leaders. Sections II and III address historically important lies and lies about history and the historical record. These two categories overlap - some lies about the historical record were historically important events. In section IV, I discuss the related notion of half-truths and give examples of misleading/deceptive half-truths about history. In the final section of this chapter, I briefly discuss the obligations of historians to give truthful accounts of historical events.

When Terror Is Not Terrorism: A Political Psychological Analysis, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article differentiates violence and its threat through terrorism and through other psychological means and ends.

B-2 Same-Sex Marriage And The Apocalyptic Consciousness Of Seventh-Day Adventism, David Hamstra

Celebration of Research and Creative Scholarship

Arguments made for and against affirming same-sex marriage in Seventh-day Adventism rely on typical moral background presuppositions about immanent and transcendent goods identified by Charles Taylor in his philosophical genealogy of A Secular Age. Arguments made only in terms of marriage’s immanent goods have the potential to diminish the plausibility of a uniquely Adventist way of imagining the transcendent: apocalyptic consciousness focused on the immanent/imminent restoration of Eden by Jesus Christ following the second coming. Comparing marriage to the this-worldly and next-worldly benefits of divergent Adventist Sabbath-keeping practices foregrounds the availability of immanentized moral presuppositions to make sense of …

Ribeiro On Mill's Harm Principle, Christopher T. Wonnell

San Diego Law Review

Ribeiro’s article is broadly sympathetic to Mill’s harm principle. However, it argues that there is no one conclusive argument in its favor. Rather, there are a plurality of different arguments that all lend strength to Mill’s general conclusion, at least in particular categories of cases. The Article begins by noting that the harm principle is not limited to criminalization. In various ways short of criminalization, the law seems to prefer some ways of life over others on what seem to be paternalistic or moralistic grounds rather than any kind of obvious harm the actors are doing to other people. We …

Jamal Khashoggi: Assassination, Abattoir, And The Law Of Small Numbers, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes psychological research on why tragedies of individuals and small numbers of people elicit more global emotional arousal than tragedies of large numbers of people.

Sagp Annual Meeting October 20 To 21 2018, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Should Deliberative Democratic Inclusion Extend To Children?, Christopher Martin

Democracy & Education

To what extent should the child’s point of view be included when a political community endeavors to make just decisions, and why? Democrats are committed to a principle of political inclusion grounded in equal respect for persons. Yet we regularly deny children the right to vote and we often just assume that the citizens doing the hard work of democratic deliberation are adults. As I will show, electoral conceptions of democracy can plausibly reconcile this tension in a way that requires no serious adjustment to the principle of inclusion. However, I also argue that a similar reconciliation seems unavailable to …

Literature And The Remains Of The Death Penalty, Peggy Kamuf

Literature

Jacques Derrida has written that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty?

Kamuf's readings address a range of questions that haunt the death penalty: the “mysteries” of …

Ethics Of Cannibalism, Philosophical Discussion Group, Georgia Southern University, Armstrong Campus

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

North Korea And The Nucleus Of Denuclearization, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes common operant conditioning principles contributing to the seeming intractability of ‘denuclearizing’ the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.

Asymptotic Quasi-Completeness And Zfc, Mirna Džamonja, Marco Panza

MPP Published Research

The axioms ZFC of first order set theory are one of the best and most widely accepted, if not perfect, foundations used in mathematics. Just as the axioms of first order Peano Arithmetic, ZFC axioms form a recursively enumerable list of axioms, and are, then, subject to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Hence, if they are assumed to be consistent, they are necessarily incomplete. This can be witnessed by various concrete statements, including the celebrated Continuum Hypothesis CH. The independence results about the infinite cardinals are so abundant that it often appears that ZFC can basically prove very little about such cardinals. …

Foregrounding Morality: Encouraging Parental Media Literacy Intervention Using The Tares Test For Ethical Persuasion, Kevin Pearce, Stanley Baran

Communication Faculty Journal Articles

In the United States, children are exposed to literally hundreds of thousands of television commercials a year and virtually every aspect of kids’ lives are replete with commercial messages. The negative effects of this exposure are well documented. Yet, there remains very little regulation or limit on advertising to children beyond that which exists for adults. Additionally, only about 1/3 of U.S. parents wish for stronger controls. This presents a challenge for media literacy scholars and practitioners. Research has shown that, when presented with information about the negative effects of commercial messages, parents are more likely to adopt some form …

Scavengers Of The In-Between: Feminist Ruminations On Dogs, Love, And Pragmatism, Cathryn Bailey

Between the Species

Abstract:

Western philosophy’s frequent conflation and denigration of animals, human others, embodiment and emotions has been powerfully documented over the past many decades. I explore the impact of this fear and loathing of the body, a somatophobia that infects much of the Western philosophical canon and its orientation toward people of color, white women, and animals. As I share reflections that are meant to enact and reveal an embodied pragmatism, I consider the potential of our love for dogs to ground a more embodied philosophical approach to love. Rooted in my own journey (as philosopher and dog lover), I pose …

A Life Absolutely Bare? A Reflection On Resistance By Irregular Refugees Against Fingerprinting As State Biopolitical Control In The European Union, Ziang Zhou

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

In a legally transitory category, irregular refugees- experience a double precariousness. They risk their lives to travel across treacherous seas to Europe for a better life. However, upon the long-awaited embarkation on the European land, they are exposed once again to the precariousness of the asylum application. They are “powerless”, “with no rights” and “to be sacrificed” as Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt suggested in their respective understanding of a “bare life”, la nuda vita. In light of the administrative difficulties in managing asylum application, the European Union introduced the “Dublin Agreement”, which stipulates mandatory biometric data collection for …

The Institution Of Gender-Based Asylum And Epistemic Injustice: A Structural Limit, Ezgi Sertler

Philosophy, Religion, and Classics

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded …