In this essay, I argue that recent leftist criticisms of "identity politics" do not address problems of inequality and interaction that are central in thinking about contemporary democratic politics. I turn instead to a set of feminist thinkers who share these critics' vision of politics, but who critically mobilize identity in a way that provides a conception of democratic citizenship for our inegalitarian and diverse polity.

In this essay, I argue that Richard Rorty's version of pragmatism focuses too much on community, and gives insufficient attention to the workings of power and the necessary relation between theory and practice. I then turn briefly to the work of Michel Foucault for a better understanding of power relations. Finally, I argue for the value of learning from a group of writers who connect theory and practice in a way that attends to both community and power relations.

Our urban problem is how to revive the reality of the outside as a dimension of human experience.Richard Sennett.

After the success of the hardback, students and academics will welcome the publication of this book in paperback. The aim of the book is to explore the connection between two perspectives that have had a profound effect upon contemporary thought: post–modernism and feminism. Through bringing together and systematically analysing the relations between these, Hekman is able to make a major intervention into current debates in social theory and philosophy. The critique of Enlightenment knowledge, she argues, is at the core of (...) both post–modernism and feminism. Each also offers a basis for critical reflections about the other. In particular, post–modern philosophy provides a means of criticizing aspects of contemporary feminism and thus contributing to the development of a more sophisticated approach to current feminist issues. (shrink)

TWEEN POP examines the creation of the "tween" in the early 2000s as a gendered and raced consumer audience. The tween, aged nine to twelve, and usually thought of as a white girl, occupies a temporality between childhood and adolescence: she has aged out of children's products but is too young to fully engage in marketing directed at teenagers. But, as Tyler Bickford argues, this seemingly narrow market grew to broadly include four to fifteen year olds, with producers and (...) marketers pulling upwards and downwards by creating material that would attract younger viewers and teenagers, thereby creating a demographic that expanded, rather than limited, the traditional reach of child and teenage markets. According to Bickford, the key to this expansion was pop music, as it provided an intensity of experience that mirrored childhood in its investments in emotional authenticity, cultural value, and relational intimacies. In other words, pop music needed to be both intimate and public--a tension that Bickford argues defined the tween's positionality as well--and tween pop did so by pairing the mainstream pop of adulthood with images and lyrics suitable for younger audiences. Throughout the book, Bickford reveals how childhood's status as a private domestic position outside of politics was not a hindrance to the cultivation of children as a mass audience but rather was the very foundation of that project. By creating an intimate public of tween pop, the tween music industry was able to position tweens as still within the private domestic sphere of family life, but connected in a broader public of other tween-pop-listening tweens. Chapter 1 looks at Kidz Bop music videos to argue that the tween music industry framed childhood domesticity as complementary to participation in a public culture. Chapter 2 focuses on Disney Channel's popular music programs' efforts to engage older children, particularly older girls, in their marketing tactics. Chapter 3 analyzes the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana and its foregrounding of tensions between girlhood, public culture, and family. Chapter 4 attends to how whiteness served as central to the tween construction of innocence and childhood. Bickford concludes the book by periodizing the tween moment as the decade from 2001 to 2011, and then outlines the developments in popular culture for children since that time. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnomusicology, feminism and gender studies, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core (...) cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell (...) provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

Elementary teachers can integrate social studies into their curriculum through thematic or interdisciplinary units. This study explores fourth-grade students’ responses to a month-long, structured inquiry. For two weeks, fourth-graders engaged in multiple readings of five secondary and fourteen primary sources using closed- and open-ended analysis questions and extemporaneous, text-based writing. For another two weeks, the writing process guided students through concept mapping, skeleton outlining, peer- and teacher-review, and revision. Three researchers examined students’ writings for criticality, complexity, and clarity. Findings yielded (...) positive, statistically significant correlations between secondary source usage and historical significance, secondary source usage and continuity-and-change, and primary source usage and contextualization. Positive, weak correlations appear between primary source usage and sourcing. No relationship appears between corroboration and other variables. Meaning is extrapolated for classroom practice and applied to seminal studies. Limitations include a small sample of largely homogeneous, inexperienced students. (shrink)

History-based trade books, such as biographies, narrative non-fiction, and expository texts, are essential secondary sources in social studies classrooms. Research, though, indicates a preponderance of misrepresentations in trade books’ depictions of historical eras and figures. We examined trade books’ historical representation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an iconic American president. The data sample featured biographies targeting various grade-ranges and published in different eras. Including books targeting early grade, middle grade, and high school students enabled comparisons of historical representation within and between (...) different grade-ranges. Incorporating texts published in different eras allowed for consideration of how Kennedy's historical representation changed over time. Mixed methods content analysis—reliant on both open and axial-coding—yielded important findings about how children's and young adult authors depicted Kennedy's family history, particularly during World War II, privileged social position, Catholicism, wife, health, tensions during his presidency, and his assassination and subsequent conspiracy theories. Trade books’ representations appeared to be shaped more by date-of-publication than intended age of the reader. Identified historical misrepresentations included presentism, omission, exceptionalism, and heroification. Significance for teachers and researchers is articulated and practical classroom suggestions are provided. (shrink)

In this provocative book, Susan Bordo untangles the myths, ideologies, and pathologies of the modern female body. Bordo explores our tortured fascination with food, hunger, desire, and control, and its effects on women's lives.

The Unity of Reason is the first major study of Kant's account of reason. It argues that Kant's wide-ranging interests and goals can only be understood by redirecting attention from epistemological questions of his work to those concerning the nature of reason. Rather than accepting a notion of reason given by his predecessors, a fundamental aim of Kant's philosophy is to reconceive the nature of reason. This enables us to understand Kant's insistence on the unity of theoretical and practical reason (...) as well as his claim that his metaphysics was driven by practical and political ends. Neiman begins by discussing the historical roots of Kant's conception of reason, and by showing Kant's solution to problems which earlier conceptions left unresolved. Kant's notion of reason itself is examined through a discussion of all the activities Kant attributes to reason. In separate chapters discussing the role of reason in science, morality, religion, and philosophy, Neiman explores Kant's distinctions between reason and knowledge, and his difficult account of the regulative principles of reason. Through examination of these principles in Kant's major and minor writings, The Unity of Reason provides a fundamentally new perspective on Kant's entire work. (shrink)

This paper will suggest a mapping for human dynamics to see where emerging digital technology currently and could further affect the dynamics of the human, technological and natural, and the cultural forms that define them. Emerging technology will be seen to reveal and surpass the limitations of human measures built on human abilities and perception. and the social structures that are derived from them. The formation of this conceptual mapping is based on the premise that digital technology has the ability (...) to better relay and hence refine dynamics working at points where culture is created and necessitated in our perception of a shared reality. Technology thus alleviates the layering, representation, labelling, and reification notions of culture that are based in human perceptual limitations. Information as referential will be seen against the tendency of technology to offer succinct mediation and direct actions as a format for any change and application with refined cultural constructions. The mapping presents a notion of homeostasis or more bereft of balance at the point where the proximal dynamics of the unit, that is, the individual, is closely supported by the technology with a changing orientation to the dynamics of a natural environment. The notion of a person as an individual is also reconsidered in terms of technology and how this changing definition is part of how we conceptualize a balanced world. Nonlinear mapping rendered in a complex will be introduced to align these mixed dynamics. Complex is here defined as a concurrence of dynamics evident in shifts of change that act as a whole and where each action affects the whole. As measures are revealed so, too, will be the source of notions of linearity and nonlinearity; mapping; point of view as a basis of complexity; and evolutionary theory as a function of a labeling of cultural dynamics. (shrink)

Summary Analogue models are actual physical setups used to model something else. They are especially useful when what we wish to investigate is difficult to observe or experiment upon due to size or distance in space or time: for example, if the thing we wish to investigate is too large, too far away, takes place on a time scale that is too long, does not yet exist or has ceased to exist. The range and variety of analogue models is too (...) extensive to attempt a survey. In this article, I describe and discuss several different analogue model experiments, the results of those model experiments, and the basis for constructing them and interpreting their results. Examples of analogue models for surface waves in lakes, for earthquakes and volcanoes in geophysics, and for black holes in general relativity, are described, with a focus on examining the bases for claims that these analogues are appropriate analogues of what they are used to investigate. A table showing three different kinds of bases for reasoning using analogue models is provided. Finally, it is shown how the examples in this article counter three common misconceptions about the use of analogue models in physics. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the conciliatory-steadfast debate occurring within social epistemology in regards to the phenomenon of peer disagreement. I will argue, because the conciliatory perspective al-lows us to understand argumentation pragmatically—as a method of problem-solving within a community rather than as a method for obtaining the truth—that in most cases, we should not simply agree to disagree.

In this book, Abraham argues that a theological imagination can expand the contours of postcolonial theory through a reexamination of notions of subjectivity, gender, and violence in a dialogical model with Karl Rahner. She raises the question of whether postcolonial theory, with its disavowal of religious agency, can provide an invigorating occasion for Catholic theology.

Violence and the Remaking of a Self Susan J. Brison. Political activism (including lobbying for new legislation, speaking out, educating others, helping survivors) can also help to undo the double bind of self-blame versus helplessness.

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden : the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga : discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari : history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue : the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe : cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Conclusion : imagined Japan(s).

: Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.

To explain the causal relation between institutional rules and people’s actions and expectations, Searle relies upon his concept of the Background, the thesis that intentional states function only given a background of capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. Any sentence, for instance, only acquires truth conditions or other conditions of satisfaction against a background of capacities, dispositions, know-how, etc. that are not themselves part of the content of the sentence. The Background also structures expectations. La Rouchefoucauld said, (...) for instance, that few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. (shrink)

On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered.At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, (...) this book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence.As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live.Bravely and beautifully written, Aftermath is that rare book that is an illustration of its own arguments. (shrink)

The Flight to Objectivity offers a new reading of Descartes' Meditations informed by cultural history, psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology, and feminist thought.

Susan Sherwin ist eine kanadische Philosophin und Wegbereiterin der feministischen Ethik. Bis zu ihrer Emeritierung war sie lange Zeit Professorin an der Dalhousie University in Halifax, Kanada. In ihrem Text „Foundations, Frameworks, Lenses: The Role of Theories in Bioethics“ von 1999 plädiert sie für eine kritische Reflexion gängiger Metaphern in der Bioethik.

The concept of "fitness" is a notion of central importance to evolutionary theory. Yet the interpretation of this concept and its role in explanations of evolutionary phenomena have remained obscure. We provide a propensity interpretation of fitness, which we argue captures the intended reference of this term as it is used by evolutionary theorists. Using the propensity interpretation of fitness, we provide a Hempelian reconstruction of explanations of evolutionary phenomena, and we show why charges of circularity which have been levelled (...) against explanations in evolutionary theory are mistaken. Finally, we provide a definition of natural selection which follows from the propensity interpretation of fitness, and which handles all the types of selection discussed by biologists, thus improving on extant definitions. (shrink)

If you're woke, you're left. If you're left, you're woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if you're one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake. The intellectual roots and resources of wokeism conflict with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Without these ideas, Neiman argues, they will continue to (...) undermine their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right. In the long run, they risk becoming what they despise. One of the world's leading philosophical voices, Neiman makes this case by tracing the malign influence of two titans of twentieth-century thought, Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, whose work undermined ideas of justice and progress and portrayed social life as an eternal struggle of us against them. A generation schooled with these voices in their heads, raised in a broader culture shaped by the ruthless ideas of neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, has set about changing the world. It's time they thought again. (shrink)

The United States Government does not mandate that US based firms follow US social and environmental law in foreign markets. However, because many developing countries do not have strong human rights, labor, and environmental laws, many multinationals have adopted voluntary corporate responsibility initiatives to self-regulate their overseas social and environmental practices. This article argues that voluntary actions, while important, are insufficient to address the magnitude of problems companies confront as they operate in developing countries where governance is often inadequate. The (...) United States can do more to ensure that its multinationals act responsibly everywhere they operate. First, policymakers should define the social and environmental responsibilities of global companies. They must consistently make their expectations for global business clear – and underscore that this objective can often be accomplished without mandates. Second, the US should closely examine the policies that undermine global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and address the many conflicting signals sent by policymakers. Third, the President should make the US government a CSR model by examining how to use its purchasing power to promote human rights. Finally, the US government should require pension funds to report on the social and environmental consequences of their investments. In these ways, Americans can mind our business – and thus make sure that US based firms do not undermine social and environmental progress when they operate in the developing world. (shrink)

A defendant’s failure to show remorse is one of the most powerful factors in criminal sentencing, including capital sentencing. Yet there is currently no evidence that remorse can be accurately evaluated in a courtroom. Conversely there is evidence that race and other impermissible factors create hurdles to evaluating remorse. There is thus an urgent need for studies about whether and how remorse can be accurately evaluated. Moreover, there is little evidence that remorse is correlated with future law-abiding behavior or other (...) legitimate penal purposes, and, in fact, there is evidence that remorse is often conflated with shame, which is correlated with increased future criminality. More accurate information on the nature and evaluation of remorse can be used to reform the criminal justice system. (shrink)

If Savulescu and Kahane’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence were implemented regarding cognitive enhancement, the result would be highly impoverishing for future children. For, apart from being inadequate to rationality itself, advocates’ accounts of cognitive enhancement sever reason from the input to judgments and decision-making that other faculties provide. When handling desire, supporters of cognitive enhancement frame conflicts between reason and the nonrational in terms of self-governance or akratic failure, depending on which one triumphs. Further, so-called negative emotions are treated as (...) simply deleterious and hostile to the rational. Alliances of the nonrational with reason toward shared ends are hence unthinkable. Having critiqued advocates’ views directly, I amplify my assessment through engagement with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Per Savulescu and Kahane, to know how to direct enhancement endeavors, “we need to form reasonable opinions on difficult questions about the nature of well-being and the good life.” Thus far, however, enhancement supporters have been largely silent on this crucial matter. Because the debate over enhancement is ultimately over what values our views of flourishing embody, it should be recast so that this crux is squarely at the fore. What is more, for our own and our children’s sakes, as we embark on this reframing, we would do well to bear in mind Aristotle’s insights about the nonrational in relation to reason and his unwavering focus on the human “that for the sake of which” (hou heneka) all that we do is, perforce, undertaken. (shrink)