This article considers some of the ways in which ‘the black woman’ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible, and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is ‘present’. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; ‘presence’ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and ‘presence’ as decolonising political praxis among Indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations (...) of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial ‘worlding’. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black women's presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality. (shrink)

This essay reflects on some of the problems with characterizing collective epistemic resistance to oppression as “unthinking” or antithetical to reason by highlighting the epistemic labor involved in contending with and resisting epistemic oppression. To do so, I develop a structural notion of epistemic gaslighting in order to highlight structural features of contexts within which collective epistemic resistance to oppression occurs. I consider two different forms of epistemic echoing as modes of contending with and resisting epistemic oppression that are sometimes (...) mischaracterized as “unthinking” or “group think.” The first sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in withdrawing from conditions of structural epistemic gaslighting that is sometimes mischaracterized as a pernicious self-sequestering that is antithetical to reason. The second sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in actively confronting epistemic structures that gaslight what is sometimes mischaracterized as an “irrational group think.” In both cases, I highlight how epistemic acts that may appear unreasonable “within the gaslight” are, on the contrary, engaged in serious and important epistemic labor. (shrink)

An interview with Gail Weiss concerning her interests and influences, especially the body and embodiment.

Starting in early childhood, children are socialized to be honest. However, they are also expected to avoid telling the truth in sensitive situations if doing so could be seen as inappropriate or impolite. Across two studies (total N = 358), the reasoning of 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children in such a scenario was investigated by manipulating whether the information in question would be helpful to the recipient. The studies used a reverse rouge paradigm, in which a confederate with a highly salient (...) red mark on her nose asked children whether she looked okay prior to having her picture taken. In Study 1, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark was temporary and the confederate did not know it was there. In Study 2, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark could be concealed with makeup. These findings show that for children as young as age 3, decisions about whether to tell the truth are influenced by the likelihood that the information would be helpful to the recipient. (shrink)

This article explores some of the ways in which ideas about and attempts to construct a European identity and sense of belonging inscribe an imaginary of Europe that is exclusionary and elitist. It suggests that the symbolic figure of ‘the immigrant woman’ is a container category that simultaneously signifies the non-European and tests and destabilizes claims to Europe's essential characteristics. It also argues that traces of this imaginary of Europe can be found in feminist scholarship on global care chains and (...) that the spatial category of ‘the domestic’ is the invisible seam that ties this scholarship to the hegemonic imaginary of Europe. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze survey data from more than 1,000 financial services employees to understand how gender inequality manifests itself in employees' informal networks. I found that even when Black and white women had jobs in which they controlled organizational resources and had ties to powerful employees, they received less work-related help from their network members than did white men. Drawing on status characteristics theory, I explain that network members were less likely to invest in women than in white (...) men because of cultural beliefs that rank women below that of white men. While past research has documented how employers use gender to rank workers and distribute rewards unequally, my research indicates that workers use gender to categorize and rank their network members as well. (shrink)

Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus Gail Fine. sense that they consider the issues it raises; and they argue, against its conclusion, that inquiry is possible. Like Plato and Aristotle, they also explain what makes inquiry possible; and they do ...

Ways of communicating effectively in spoken English, using technology, in a virtual globalized context have received little attention from applied linguists. The role of language in synchronous computer-mediated discourse used in virtual teamwork is now emerging as a key area of research concern in business management and information technology disciplines. This article uses linguistic frameworks, most particularly critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, in particular appraisal analysis, to demonstrate how interpersonal meanings may create dominance, power and solidarity within a (...) sample of a virtual team management meetings. Focusing on one manager case study, we investigate how language is used, consciously or unconsciously, to dominate and close down discussion with his colleagues. We first present the key findings from a turn-taking analysis and then present, through the application of appraisal analysis, how this manager opens or contracts the space available for others to participate. By revealing how power and control unfold through this analysis, the findings may lead to an enhanced self-awareness among all members in virtual teams and reveal how language plays a crucial role in engaging members during a meeting, or in this case, disengaging them. (shrink)

The Peri ide^on is the only work in which Aristotle systematically sets out and criticizes arguments for the existence of Platonic forms. Gail Fine presents the first full-length treatment in English of this important but neglected work. She asks how, and how well, Aristotle understands Plato's theory of forms, and why and with what justification he favors an alternative metaphysical scheme. She examines the significance of the Peri ide^on for some central questions about Plato's theory of forms--whether, for example, (...) there are forms corresponding to every property or only to some, and if only to some, then to which ones; whether forms are universals, particulars or both; and whether they are meanings, properties or both. Fine also provides a general discussion of Plato's theory of forms, and of our evidence about the Peri ide^on and its date, scope, and aims. While she pays careful attention to the details of the text, she also relates it to contemporary philosophical concerns. The book will be valuable for anyone interested in metaphysics ancient or modern. (shrink)

Ubuntu, or humanness, has been theorized as a uniquely African contribution to the world. At the same time, others insist that it is a universal ethical principle. This paper particularly wants to look at a sub-theme of ubuntu studies, regarding how some of the authors and researchers have wanted to apply it to business, even suggesting that ubuntu can provide a model for ethical management principles that can also result in better outcomes for businesses. To approach business with an ethical (...) emphasis is clearly better than casting ethics aside in pursuit of profit without concern for human flourishing. But, can ubuntu management principles be used in a global capitalist framework, to soften the hard edges of cutthroat capitalism? Or does the ubuntu management approach without capitalist critique fall short of reaching the goal and practice of humanness? Additionally, perhaps the fault of current practices is not only due to the capitalist global economy, but also, an historical and a current global anti-black racism as well as sexism, which continues to skew the numbers of managers to greatly over-represent white males. This is due to historical privileging of men and the white race. We need to put forth our best efforts to ensure fair treatment of workers, who are valued as persons, and paid a good wage, with profits to go to them so that they can nourish and support their extended families. An ubuntu ethic could indeed be helpful as a guide for deciding which kinds of changes to the larger economic and political structures we should advocate and fight for (Publisher's website includes free full text). (shrink)

J’ai souvent l’impression que dans les domaines tels que les études platoniciennes où l’on ne fait que réfléchir sur les textes anciens qui ont déjà attiré un nombre immense de générations de lecteurs posant les mêmes questions, ce ne sont pas tant les idées ou les hypothèses qui déterminent la qualité d’une approche que la manière dont elles sont exprimées. La recherche du Socrate historique, la volonté de prouver qu’on peut le trouver dans les textes des socratiques si différents les (...) uns de... (shrink)

The paper surveys the lifetime achievements of Claude Sumner, S.J., a Canadian Jesuit who lived for 45 years in Ethiopia and devoted his life's work to collecting, documenting and evaluating Ethiopian philosophical texts and oral literature.

The literature on epistemic injustice has been helpful for highlighting some of the epistemic harms that have long troubled those working in area studies that concern oppressed populations. Nonetheless, a good deal of this literature is oriented toward those in a position to perpetrate injustices, rather than those who historically have been harmed by them. This orientation, I argue, is ill-suited to the work of epistemic decolonization. In this essay, I call and hold attention to the epistemic interests of those (...) who are epistemically marginalized on account of relations of dominance and oppression. To do so, I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work, which uses a systems approach focused on epistemic agency. I develop Dotson’s insights further to argue that epistemic inclusions may be just as pernicious as epistemic exclusions Specifically, I highlight some of the ways in which epistemic agents can be included in epistemic systems in a manner that is epistemically exploitative—extracting epistemic labor coercively or in ways that are distinctly non-reciprocal. I then turn to María Lugones’ distinction between horizontal and vertical practices to discuss avenues of resisting both exclusions and inclusions that thwart the epistemic agency of marginalized knowers. (shrink)

This volume draws together a series of thirteen essays on ancient epistemology by Gail Fine. She discusses knowledge, belief, subjectivity, and scepticism in Plato, Aristotle, and the Pyrrhonian sceptics. They consider such questions as: is episteme knowledge? Is doxa belief? Do the ancientshave the notion of subjectivity? Do any of them countenance external world scepticism? Several essays compare these philosophers with one another, as well as with more recent discussions of knowledge, belief, subjectivity, and scepticism, asking how if at (...) all the ancient discussions of these topicsdiffer from more recent ones. In exploring these issues, the essays often make use of the distinction between concepts and conceptions, between an abstract account of something, and more determinate ways of filling it in. Together they compose a rich set of investigations, illuminating ancientperspectives on the central questions in epistemology. (shrink)

This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that (...) our bodies are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness”, impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (shrink)

In most of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates professes to inquire into some virtue. At the same time, he professes not to know what the virtue in question is. How, then, can he inquire into it? Doesn't he need some knowledge to guide his inquiry? Socrates' disclaimer of knowledge seems to preclude Socratic inquiry. This difficulty must confront any reader of the Socratic dialogues; but one searches them in vain for any explicit statement of the problem or for any explicit solution (...) to it. The Meno, by contrast, both raises it explicitly and proposes a solution. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to both newer and more established ideas in the growing field of critical phenomenology from a number of disciplinary perspectives.

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience (...) the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009. (shrink)

Large-scale sequencing tests, including whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing, are rapidly moving into clinical use. Sequencing is already being used clinically to identify therapeutic opportunities for cancer patients who have run out of conventional treatment options, to help diagnose children with puzzling neurodevelopmental conditions, and to clarify appropriate drug choices and dosing in individuals. To evaluate and support clinical applications of these technologies, the National Human Genome Research Institute and National Cancer Institute have funded studies on clinical and research sequencing under (...) the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program as well as studies on return of results. Most of these studies use sequencing in real-world clinical settings and collect data on both the application of sequencing and the impact of receiving genomic findings on study participants. They are occurring in the context of controversy over how to obtain consent for exome and genome sequencing. (shrink)

Lecturer in social foundations of education and women's studies, Victoria College, Australia.

In this article we investigate how speakers contribute to the interactive rise and fall of emotion in problematic interactions in a data set of in-bound telephone conversations collected from call centres in the Philippines. These interactions are between the Filipino Customer Service Representatives and American clients who initiate the calls to seek information, clarification, or resolution to a problem. The study draws on Appraisal theory to analyse the contribution of the caller and the CSR to initiating, maintaining and adjusting the (...) interpersonal intensity of the interaction. Findings point to a limited reliance on explicit attitude on the part of both speakers, with attitude more often implied rather than expressed explicitly. Of note, too, is the interdependence of the attitudinal choices on the part of each speaker, and the role that concessive contractors such as just, already, once, yet and actually, as well as moments of silence can play in the management of the emotive intensity. While we intend the outcomes to make a contribution to professional training in the industry, we also look beyond that context to contribute in theoretical and methodological terms to the analysis of interactions in other contexts where problems need to be resolved through talk. (shrink)

It is an ancient view, to be found even in Aristotle’s analysis of friendship, that the other is an alter ego, another myself. More recently, this conception has provoked spirited debate within and without the phenomenological tradition. It can be found in a wide variety of texts, from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations to Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” The basic position can be summarized as follows. Intentional experiences are subjective, first-person experiences, not objective, third-person experiences.

This paper is a counter to the view that names are always predicates with the same extension as a metalinguistic predicate with the form “is a thing called “N”” (the Predicate View). The Predicate View is in opposition to the Referential View of names. In this paper, I undermine one argument for the Predicate View. The Predicate View’s adherents take examples of uses of names that have the surface appearance of a predicate and generalise from these to treat uses of (...) names that do not have the surface appearance of a predicate. They show that the Predicate View can provide a unified account of these two uses and assume that the Referential account cannot. I propose an alternative view of names, the Polysemy View. This view allows one to resist the pressure to generalise from the cases with the surface appearance of predicates to all uses of names while nevertheless providing connections between the uses. On the Polysemy View names are not, in their core use, metalinguistic predicates. Names are predominantly referring expressions but they also freelance as metalinguistic predicates on occasion. They have a double life. This double life is possible because of the pragmatic and conventional connections between the two aspects of that life. My main aim in this paper is to show that the Predicate View is not the only view that can give a good account of apparently predicative uses of names. In addition, I offer some inconclusive reasons to prefer the Polysemy View over the Predicate View. My paper assumes a background framework that the Predicate and Referentialist Views share and I do not attempt to justify that framework. I ignore many other views of names (notably descriptivist views and relevance theoretic views) in order to focus on the debate between these two opponents. (shrink)

In a characteristically stimulating and important paper, ‘Episteme’, Myles Burnyeat discusses what he calls the epistemic troika, which consists of knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge that, and knowledge how. He argues that the troika ‘lacks universal validity’; he ‘suspects’ that it is the product of Anglophone philosophy in the 1950s-early 1970s. He also challenges the philosophical value of the troika. In my paper, I explore the troika, both in its own right and as a guide to Plato’s epistemology; I also assess (...) Burnyeat’s views on these issues. (shrink)

The article follows the theme of dealing with adversaries and conflict resolution. As an exercise in intercultural philosophy, the paper explores the philosophies of two different regions, the Amazon of South America (Jivaro and Yanesha/Amuesha people of Peru) and Western Province of Kenya, East Africa (with a focus on the Bukusu people). Exploring the insights of other researchers as well as drawing upon interviews by the author, the article explains each group’s philosophy of conflict resolution referencing myths, folktales, proverbs, and (...) interviews with sages. In the case of both communities, practitioners of peace must engage in bravery to reach out to others and address them with a message of peaceful relations. The Yanesha have a founding myth that emphasizes the role of a woman in establishing harmonious relations, whereas the Bukusu folktales emphasize men’s leadership. (shrink)

Since Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963, women’s rights in the country have made slow gains and suffered some setbacks. However, the rights of women and their guaranteed participation in politics was outlined in Kenya’s 2010 Constitution. This paper will survey some of those gains as well as describe the social backlash experienced by women leaders who have been trailblazers in post-colonial Kenyan politics.

Philosophy and the Disdain for History: Reflections on Husserl's Ergiinzungsband to the Crisis GAIL SOFFER HUSSERL'S RECENTLY PUBLISHED Erganzungsband to the Cr/s/s' is a highly inti- mate statement, almost a confession, of hope and despair at the end of a philosophical life, a compendium of urgent, world-historical tasks not yet laid to rest. Above all, it abounds in reflections on history. In these, two things are poignantly clear: the late Husserl is completely convinced that history is of the utmost (...) importance to philosophy; he is not certain why. On a superfi- cial interpretation, the reason may seem obvious: Husserl's philosophical proj- ect is founded on the ideal of presuppositionless rational insight, and hence is Cartesian and ahistorical in its essence. The turn to history is to something external, and an implicit admission of the limitations of phenomenology itself, its inability to address the most pressing and meaningful problems of human existence: the crisis in European society and values, the ultimate significance of a man's life, work, and death. For those who would seek external motives for Husserl's turn to history, material is not lacking in this volume. There are moving philosophical discussions -- set in the atemporal phenomenological present tense -- of nationalism, of territoriality and the search for Lebensraum, of racism and xenophobia, of the forced emigration of families to a "no man's land. '' There is an attack on... (shrink)

This editorial critically engages with the understanding of openness by attending to how notions of presence and absence come bundled together as part of efforts to make open. This is particularly evident in contemporary discourse around data production, dissemination, and use. We highlight how the preoccupations with making data present can be usefully analyzed and understood by tracing the related concerns around what is missing, unavailable, or invisible, which unvaryingly but often implicitly accompany debates about data and openness.