Stereotypes are false or misleading generalizations about groups, generally widely shared in a society, and held in a manner resistant, but not totally, to counterevidence. Stereotypes shape the stereotyper’s perception of stereotyped groups, seeing the stereotypic characteristics when they are not present, and generally homogenizing the group. The association between the group and the given characteristic involved in a stereotype often involves a cognitive investment weaker than that of belief. The cognitive distortions involved in stereotyping lead to various forms of (...) moral distortion, to which moral philosophers have paid insufficient attention. Some of these are common to all stereotypes—failing to see members of the stereotyped groups as individuals, moral distancing, failing to see subgroup diversity within the group. Other moral distortions vary with the stereotype. Some attribute a much more damaging or stigmatizing characteristic (e.g. being violent) than others (e.g. being good at basketball). But the characteristic in question must also be viewed in its wider historical and social context to appreciate its overall negative and positive dimensions. (shrink)

Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, originally published in 1980, gives an account of "altruistic emotions" and friendship that brings out their moral value. Blum argues that moral theories centered on rationality, universal principle, obligation, and impersonality cannot capture this moral importance. This was one of the first books in contemporary moral philosophy to emphasize the moral significance of emotions, to deal with friendship as a moral phenomenon, and to challenge the rationalism of standard interpretations of Kant, although Blum’s "sentimentalism" (...) owes more to Schopenhauer than to Hume. It was a forerunner to care ethics, and feminist ethics more generally; to virtue ethics; and to subsequent influential interpretations of Kant that attempted to room for altruistic emotion and friendship, and other forms of particularism and partialism. In addition, the work has been widely influential in religious studies, political theory, bioethics, and feminist ethics. (shrink)

The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice or other harms, (...) such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies. Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms of class and the material harms of race; missing the historical dimension of class injustice; masking class by a narrowing of the complex normative structure of racial disparities; or not recognizing that a class-focused initiative (like raising the minimum wage) can address substantial racial justice concerns, even though not all of them. “Systemic racism” terminology recognizes class explanatorily but suppresses it normatively. Charles Mills's influential notion of “white supremacy,” while a powerful tool for conceptualizing and illuminating racial injustice, can also contribute to minimizing or masking the justice-related impact of class, as do some of Mills's specific discussions of class in various writings. (shrink)

Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly but (...) intelligibly regarded as inhering in the nature of racial groups). This view has an historical pedigree in the work of J.G. von Herder, and the tradition of "national racism." (2) non-inherentist culturalism (groups regarded as possessing changeable, malleable inferiorizing cultural characteristics). (3) colonalist culturalism (colonial subjects regarded as uncivilized but capable of becoming civilized under European tutelage). (4) neo-racism (cultures of former colonial subjects in or potentially immigrating to European countries are regarded in an inherentist manner and incompatible with but not inferior to European cultures). Non-inherentist culturalism (#2) can be put to either a racist or an anti-racist use. (shrink)

Zen and the Unspeakable God reevaluates how we study mystical experience. Forsaking the prescriptive epistemological box that has constrained the conversation for decades, ensuring that methodology has overshadowed subject matter, Jason Blum proposes a new interpretive approach—one that begins with a mystic’s own beliefs about the nature of mystical experience. Blum brings this approach to bear on the experiential accounts of three mystical exemplars: Meister Eckhart, Ibn al-ʿArabi, and Hui-neng. Through close readings of their texts, he uncovers the (...) mystics’ own fundamental assumptions about transcendence and harnesses these as interpretive guides to their experiences. The predominant theory-first path to interpretation has led to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of individual mystical experiences and fostered specious conclusions about cross-cultural comparability among them. Blum’s hermeneutic invites the scholarly community to begin thinking about mystical experience in a new way—through the mystics’ eyes. Zen and the Unspeakable God offers a sampling of the provocative results of this technique and an explanation of its implications for theories of consciousness and our contemporary understanding of the nature of mystical experience. (shrink)

South Africa shared with the world the warning of a new strain of SARS-CoV2, Omicron, in November 2021. As a result, many high-income countries (HICs) instituted complete travel bans on persons leaving South Africa and other neighbouring countries. These bans were unnecessary from a scientific standpoint, and they ran counter to the International Health Regulations. In short, South Africa was penalized for sharing data. Data sharing during pandemics is commonly justified by appeals to solidarity. In this paper, we argue that (...) solidarity is, at best, an aspirational ideal to work toward but that it cannot ground an obligation to share data. Instead, low-and-middle income countries (LIMCs) should be guided by the principle of reciprocity, which states that we ought to return good for good received. Reciprocity is necessarily a conditional principle. LMICs, we argue, should only share data during future pandemics on the condition that HICs provide enforceable assurances that the benefits of data sharing will be equitably distributed and that LMICs won’t be penalized for sharing information. (shrink)

Beginning with a focus on the ethical foundations of caregiving in health and expanding towards problems of ethics and justice implicated in a range of issues, this book develops and expands the notion of care itself and its connection to practice. Organised around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility, (...) and justice, The Ethics of Carepresents case studies examining institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, indigenous rights and postcolonialism in care and theoretical approaches to the concept of care. Offering discussions from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including sociology, communication, and social theory, as well as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and deconstruction, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in healthcare, medicine, justice and the question of how we think about care as a notion and social form, and how this is related to practice. (shrink)

Forschungen zur verkörperten Intelligenz und zu den symbolischen Vermittlungen des menschlichen Geistes werden bislang zumeist in getrennten Disziplinen betrieben. Die aus der Kulturphilosophie, Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft, Theologie, Medizin, Psychiatrie, Psychologie und Kognitionswissenschaft stammenden Beiträge des Bandes vereint jedoch das gemeinsame Ziel, einen umfassenden Begriff von Verkörperung zu entwickeln, der die Grenzziehung zwischen kulturalistischen und naturalistischen Ansätzen überwindet.

Neoliberalism is an approach to social policy, now globally influential, that applies market approaches to all aspects of social life, including education. Charter schools, privately operated but publicly funded, are its most prominent manifestation in the U.S. The neoliberal principles of competition, consumerism, and choice cannot serve as foundations of a sound and equitable public education system. Neoliberalism embraces socio-economic inequality overall and in doing so constricts any justice mission its adherents espouse in virtue of serving a relatively disadvantaged student (...) population, as charter schools often (by no means always) do. It constricts educational justice by (1) embracing a “human capital” approach as the primary good of education, (2) creating educational inequality through (unofficially) selecting a relatively advantaged segment of the disadvantaged demographic it serves, (3) denying the effect of poverty on educational performance, and (4) devaluing its students’ familial ethnic cultures. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that one of the key differences between ancient skepticism and modern and contemporary skepticism is that the ancient skeptic does not call into question the existence of the external world, but only our ability to know the properties or qualities of external objects. In this paper, I argue that in Sextus Empiricus's attack on the Epicurean criterion of truth one finds evidence that the ancient Pyrrhonist also suspends judgment about the existence of external objects.

The promise of a free, high-quality public education is supposed to guarantee every child a shot at the American dream. But our widely segregated schools mean that many children of color do not have access to educational opportunities equal to those of their white peers. In Integrations, historian Zoë Burkholder and philosopher Lawrence Blum investigate what this country’s long history of school segregation means for achieving just and equitable educational opportunities in the United States. Integrations focuses on multiple marginalized (...) groups in American schooling: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. The authors show that in order to grapple with integration in a meaningful way, we must think of integration in the plural, both in its multiple histories and in the many possible definitions of and courses of action for integration. Ultimately, the authors show, integration cannot guarantee educational equality and justice, but it is an essential component of civic education that prepares students for life in our multiracial democracy. (shrink)

Diversität ist eines der zentralen Themen unserer Zeit. Sie durchdringt alle Lebensbereiche unserer Gesellschaften. Das Nachdenken über Diversität reicht von den Naturwissenschaften über die Geschichtswissenschaften, die Gesellschaftswissenschaften, die Philosophie bis zu den Künsten. Diversität ist zudem politisch und emotional beladen. Man denke an gesellschaftliche Minderheiten und ihre Rechte oder an das massive Artensterben unserer Tage. In diesem Buch wird nicht nur über Einzelaspekte von Diversität berichtet, es wird auch eine Synthese versucht. Drei einleitende Kapitel der HerausgeberInnen führen verständlich in komplexe (...) interdisziplinäre Problemzusammenhänge ein. Der Band versammelt 17 Beiträge namhafter Autorinnen und Autoren aus den Bereichen Kunst-, Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Medizin und Gesellschaftstheorie.00. (shrink)

The Renaissance was a period of great intellectual change and innovation as philosophers rediscovered the philosophy of classical antiquity and passed it on to the modern age. Renaissance philosophy is distinct both from the medieval scholasticism, based on revelation and authority, and from philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who transformed it into new philosophical systems. Despite the importance of the Renaissance to the development of philosophy over time, it has remained largely understudied by historians of philosophy and professional (...) philosophers. This anthology aims to correct this by providing scholars and students of philosophy with representative translations of the most important philosophers of the Renaissance. Its purpose is to help readers appreciate philosophy in the Renaissance and its importance in the history of philosophy. The anthology includes translations from philosophers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and it ranges from works on moral and political philosophy, to metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy, thereby providing historians and students of philosophy with a sense for the nature, breadth, and complexity of philosophy in the Renaissance. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction by a historian of Renaissance philosophy, as well as select secondary sources, in order to encourage further study. (shrink)

This book demonstrates that ancient Christian Gnosticism was an ancient form of cultural criticism in a mythological garb. It establishes that, much like modern forms of critical theory, ancient Gnosticism was set on deconstructing mainstream discourses and cultural premises. Strains of critical theory dealt with include the Frankfurt School, queer theory, and poststructural philosophy. The book documents how in both ancient Gnosticism and modern critical theories issues that used to serve as premises for discussion or as concepts relegated to the (...) realms of the “natural” and the “given” in their respective historical contexts, are transformed into objects of contention. The main aim of this book is to salvage the historical category of Gnosticism from its present scholarly disavowal, if only because Gnosticism, when read as a cultural, and not only a religious phenomenon, presents us an ancient form of culture criticism which would be hard to parallel until (post) modernity. While Hans Jonas remarked many years ago that “something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” by the 21st century global world this something has already entered and lives with us. We can thus still benefit from another perspective, even if it comes from Mediterranean people who lived almost 2,000 years ago. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of the later Renaissance whose writings encompassed the ongoing traditions, intentions, and achievements of his times and transmitted them into early modernity. Taking up the medieval practice of the art of memory and of formal logic, he focused on the creativity of the human mind. Bruno … Continue reading Giordano Bruno →.

Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, the author (...) contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

Nichols’s view of empathy (in Sentimental Rules) in light of experimental moral psychology suffers from several deficiencies: (1) It operates with an impoverished view of the altruistic emotions (empathy, sympathy, concern, compassion, etc.) as mere short-term, affective states of mind, lacking any essential connection to intentionality, perception, cognition, and expressiveness. (2) It fails to keep in focus the moral distinction between two very different kinds of emotional response to the distress and suffering of others—other-directed, altruistic, emotions that have moral value, (...) and self-directed emotional responses, such as personal distress, that do not. (3) Nichols is correct to see morality as requiring affectivity, and the capability of emotional response to others; but his incorrect view of altruistic emotions (and of emotions in general) leads him to misstate the connection between morality and emotion. (4) Nichols’s specific attempt to ground moral judgment in emotion fails, but the argument he provides for it is part of the explanation of point (2), his failure to sustain the distinction between egoistic and altruistic emotions. (5) Without in any way denying that moral philosophy is strengthened by knowledge of empirical psychology, I suggest that the foregoing failures of Nichols’s argument are partly due to his misuse of particular empirical results and findings, and possibly in part to a weakened commitment to the distinctive contribution the humanistic methods of philosophy make to our understanding of the moral dimension of life. (shrink)

En este conciso estudio se explicará la concepción de la luz que encontramos en Francisco Suárez. Si bien distinta, y por cierto distante, de las teorías modernas (corpuscular y ondulatoria), encontramos en Suárez un corpus de principios, de base y raigambre aristotélica, que dan cuenta de una mecánica del todo exótica para nuestra men- talidad, pero abundante y enriquecida en contenido lógico y filosófico: la filosofía natural de Francisco Suárez está basada, en términos generales, en los conceptos de virtud, necesidad, (...) esfera de acción y energía en el sentido originario de esta palabra. Para sorpresa del lector mínimamente aficionado a estos temas, encontraremos en la física de Suárez explicaciones por momentos mucho más naturales, más claras y más satisfactorias sobre la propagación de la luz y sobre la acción a distancia de lo que han propuesto hasta hoy las teorías en vigencia. Francisco Suárez, desde ya, queda excluido del proyecto de Galileo y de Francis Bacon; no ofrece ni persigue resultados mate- máticos, sino un conocimiento ontológico del Universo y una interesante mecánica esencialista. (shrink)

In High Schools, Race, and America’s Future, Lawrence Blum offers a lively account of a rigorous high school course on race and racism. Set in a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse high school, the book chronicles students’ engagement with one another, with a rich and challenging academic curriculum, and with questions that relate powerfully to their daily lives. Blum, an acclaimed moral philosopher whose work focuses on issues of race, reflects with candor, insight, and humor on the challenges (...) and surprises encountered in teaching—the unexpected turns in conversation, the refreshing directness of students’ questions, the “aha” moments and the awkward ones, and the paradoxes of his own role as a white college professor teaching in a multiracial high school classroom. High Schools, Race, and America’s Future provides an invaluable resource for those who want to teach students to think deeply and talk productively about race. (shrink)

Estudio preliminar. I. La era de Darwin. II. Las coordenadas españolas de la polémica darwinista. III. Algunos datos sobre la introducción del darwinismo en España. IV. Breve historia de la controversia ideológica. V. Implicaciones filosóficas e ideológicas del darwinismo. Nota sobre los textos. ANTOLOGÍA DE TEXTOS. I. Un debate largo y virulento. I.1. Defensores. I.2. Adversarios. I.3. Posturas conciliadoras. II. Tres acontecimientos polémicos. II.1. El drawinismo en Granada. II.2. El I Congreso Católico Español. II.3. El cementerio del nacimiento de Darwin. (...) III. Darwinismo social. IV. Darwinismo y socialismo. IV.1. Anarquismo. IV.2. Socialismo marxista. V. La muerte de Darwin en la Prensa. V.1. Prensa católico-tradicional. V.2. Prensa liberal. V.3. Prensa obrera. Bibliografía y cronología del darwinismo en España [1859-1900]. (shrink)

Esse texto propõe a hipótese da “máquina s’imaginante” como sendo o constructo fundamental da teoria da imaginação de Spinoza e pretende justificar certa leitura que permita tal denominação. Para tanto, parte-se da noção de _contemplari externè_ para, em seguida, explanar a noção interpretativa de _simul desconcertante_, a qual desempenha importante papel a fim de forjar a noção de _centramento em si_, noção que permite captar os efeitos de interioridade e exterioridade relativas ao indivíduo humano e cujo engendramento faz a natureza (...) das coisas ser apreendida teleologicamente. A partir do _centramento em si _são examinadas e interpretadas categorias relevantes da imaginação, sendo a mais importante delas a _concatenatio_. Por fim, são indicados alguns desdobramentos da hipótese de leitura proposta. (shrink)

Charles Mills adhered to the highest standards of philosophical scholarship, while seeing his work firmly as a contribution to the cause of social justice. He had a deep appreciation for historical context and a history of ideas approach to racial/philosophical questions. He was one of the foremost Rawls interpreters or our time, though only a few years before his passing was he so recognized. He channeled his analytic training in his habit of demonstrating how a view is strengthened when an (...) author shows how objections can be systematically replied to. I wish he had tried to integrate class and race into a larger theoretical system, of both an explanatory and normative character. Class is sometimes an unnoted presence in his explanation of white supremacy. Charles saw himself contributing to a collective scholarly social justice project and was happy to acknowledge the greater expertise of others in allied areas to his. (shrink)

The Pyrrhonian skeptic’s stance, as described by Sextus Empiricus, is in good part defined by his suspending judgment or belief about all the matters he has so far investigated. Most interpreters of Pyrrhonism maintain that it is a mistake to understand this form of skepticism in terms of doubt because suspension as conceived of by the Pyrrhonist is markedly different from the state of doubt. In this article, I expound the reasons that have been offered in support of that prevailing (...) view and assess their strength. (shrink)

Politics never became a central intellectual interest of Murdoch’s, but she produced one important and visionary political essay in the ‘50’s, several popular writings on political matters, and a significant chapter in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that echoes throughout that book. In the 1958 “House of Theory,” she sees the welfare state as having almost entirely failed to address the deeper problems of capitalist society, including a failure to create the conditions for values she saw as central to (...) the socialist tradition—equality, absence of exploitation, meaningful work, and a sense of community. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch abandons the idea that moral ideals provide a guide to constructing a good society. She retains from her earlier work that the individual-moral domain is governed by perfectionism, but society cannot be. ‘Society must be thought of as a bad job to be made the best of’, for example, through the liberal idea of rights. Murdoch had a lifelong engagement with Marxism as a philosophy, introduced to her as a member of the Communist Party in the late ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and continuing through her subsequent long Labour period, and even when she moved to the Right in the Thatcher era. Marx and Marxism were always part of her mental universe, and she continued to work out what she agreed and disagreed with in it. (shrink)

Unusual among Western philosophers, Schopenhauer explicitly drew on Hindu and especially Buddhist traditions inhis moral philosophy. He saw plurality, especially the plurality of human persons, as a kind of illusion; in reality all is one, and compassionate acts express an implicit recognition of this oneness. Max Scheler retains the transcendence of self aspect of compassion but emphasizes that the subject must have a clear, lived sense of herself as a distinct individual in order for that transcendence to take place properly. (...) This feature is absent in the Buddhist tradition. Feminist philosophers of the early second wave built on this insight (only occasionally drawing it from Scheler) to recognize ways women are often not socialized to develop this distinctive sense of self, therefore harming their ability to engage in compassion and other forms of care for others. Iris Murdoch adds a Freudian-inspired (though Freud influenced Scheler also) pessimism about the ability of humans to keep their identities sufficiently distinct from the other to allow a clear view of the other, and thus real care and help to the other to take place. But in her later work, Murdoch explicitly recognizes and draws on the Buddhist tradition of oneness and transcendence of the self. Group solidarities can partake of aspects of Buddhist oneness and self-transcendence, for example the sense of fellowship in a social justice movement in which Blacks draw on a shared identity to experience connection, compassion, empathy, and solidarity with one another. But social justice movements also allow for a solidarity across racial lines, grounded in the shared commitment to justice, including justice for one of the groups in the solidarity community. (All these issues are powerfully portrayed in the 2014 film, Selma.) None of these solidarities, however, express the universalistic dimension of Buddhist oneness. (shrink)