A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor, one theoretical and one in terms of methodology. On a theoretical level we argue for a new orientation to metaphor and metaphoricity based on enactive cognition and distributed language and cognition. In recent years enactive and distributed cognition have been developing a new concept of cognition as an inter-bodily (...) and ecologically afforded achievement, and in light of this theoretical development we propose an approach to metaphor as a multi-body, multi-party, and multi-timescale phenomenon. On a methodological level we demonstrate a new way of analyzing metaphoricity in multimodal social interaction based on in-depth video analyses of two real life examples in which we introduce metaphorical identification criteria focusing on doubleness in meaning, affordances for co-action, co-ordination, and co-exper.. (shrink)

The article discusses Karl Popper’s account of Lamarckism. In this article I use Popper’s published and unpublished statements regarding Lamarckism as well as his correspondence with the Australian immunologist Edward Steele and other biologists to examine why Popper was interested in Lamarckism, how his account of Lamarckism can be understood in the context of his philosophy, and what, if any, new context Popper provided for the discussion of this abandoned doctrine. I begin by discussing Popper’s frame of reference regarding Lamarckism, (...) examining how it changed following his involvement with different “transitory groups” of biologists concerned with redefining the boundaries between traditional disciplines. I then discuss Popper’s account of Lamarckism in positioning it in relation to three aspects of his philosophy: his distinction between the principles of induction/instruction and deduction/selection, his distinction between scientific and teleological concepts, and his concept of progress in science. Then, I follow the debate concerning Steele’s Lamarckian experiments with a closer look at Popper’s role and his position in this controversy. I conclude that Popper’s writings provided a new context for the discussion of Lamarckism in the 1970s and 1980s, thus making it “scientifically acceptable” again. I preface this discussion by a brief outline of Steele’s Lamarckian hypothesis and Popper’s comments on Steele’s work. (shrink)

This article takes up the commonplace antagonism between ‘second wave’ lesbian feminism and ‘third wave’ queer theory and politics, and argues that the antagonism itself is both historically and politically reductive. First, I make the case that ‘third wave’ queer theory actually shares its central concern – namely, accountability for intra-group inequalities – with lesbian feminism. However, I argue that ‘third wave’ queer theories ultimately founder in their bid for a more reflexive political praxis by tending to hold others – (...) lesbian feminists – accountable for ongoing inequalities rather than grappling with them directly. By contrast, I show that lesbian feminists from the late 1970s to the late 1980s developed a reparative politics that succeeds where ‘third wave’ theories stumble by developing relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism, and by establishing processes by which to repair these relationships when they founder. I conclude by arguing that a fuller attention to the history of lesbian feminism, in fact, offers important resources for feminists and queers dealing with issues of intra-group marginalization, such as transphobia, in the present. (shrink)

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6–3;0 and 3;6–4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors. In two between-participant groups, children either just heard or heard and repeated WANT-to, WANT-X, and control prime sentences after which to-infinitival constructions were elicited. We found that both age groups were primed, but in different ways. In the 2;6–3;0 year olds, WANT-to primes facilitated the provision of to in target (...) utterances relative to the control contexts, but no significant effect was found for WANT-X primes. In the 3;6–4;0 year olds, both WANT-to and WANT-X primes showed a priming effect, namely WANT-to primes facilitated and WANT-X primes inhibited provision of to. We argue that these effects reflect developmental differences in the level of proficiency in and preference for the two constructions, and they are broadly consistent with “priming as implicit learning” accounts. The current study shows that children as young as 2;6–3;0 years of age can be primed when they have only heard particular constructions, children are acquiring at least two constructions for the matrix verb WANT, and that these two WANT-constructions compete for production. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that in Western postmodernism, both religion and the university are under the sign of simulacra. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “death of God” instigates a discussion of postmodernism and a simulacrum of religion. According to Jean Baudrillard and the theory of the Three Orders of the Simulacra, reality died and “hyperreality” took its place and now governs our existence. If, for Michel Foucault, the religious phenomenon today is outside theological beliefs and traditions, oriented towards the (...) body, power and panoptic supervision, for Jacques Derrida the phenomenon appears more as a negative theology of deconstruction. The theoretical objective seeks to explore the mutations that have occurred both in the academic environment and in religion under the phenomenon of globalisation and the technologisation of humanity. Here, the study of religion in universities is a third order simulacrum, the consequence of which is the illusion of knowledge and the unconditional independence of humanity, manipulated by technological evolution. The methodology used is Derridarian decon­struction, Nietzschean nihilism and the Baudrillardian criticism of the postmodern consumerist system. (shrink)

This book seeks to fill a void in contemporary aesthetics scholarship by considering the cognitive features that make the aesthetic and artistic worthy of philosophical study. Aesthetic cognition has been largely abandoned by analytical philosophy, which instead tends to focus its attention on the ‘non-exhibited’ properties of artwork or issues concerning semantic and syntactic structure. The Cognitive Basis of Aesthetics innovatively seeks to correct the marginalization of aesthetics in analytical philosophy by reinterpreting aesthetic cognition through an integration of Ernst Cassirer’s (...) philosophy of symbolic forms with Paul Crowther’s theory of imagination and philosophy of art. This integration has three important outcomes: 1) it explains why the aesthetic and artistic constitute a unique form of knowledge; 2) it shows the role this plays in the formation of aesthetics as a discipline; and 3) it describes why aesthetic cognition is so deeply engaging. This book’s unique theoretical approach engages with important works of visual, conceptual, and digital art, as well as literature, music, and theatre. (shrink)

Cette étude se propose de vérifier l’efficacité des collocations en tant qu’indice pour distinguer les genres textuels. De plus, elle a le double objectif d’aborder l’exploration de la variabilité de l’italien en utilisant des méthodologies computationnelles, et de vérifier l’efficacité d’une nouvelle mesure d’association dans l’étude des collocations.Quatre typologies de collocations ont été analysées (verbe-nom, nom-adjectif, nom-nom et nom-préposition-nom) dans six genres textuels différents, dont trois sont écrits (textes littéraires, textes académiques et compositions scolaires) et trois sont oraux (conversations, discours (...) et dialogues filmiques).La fréquence des collocations dans les différents genres montre que chaque typologie de texte a des préférences spécifiques pour des typologies de collocations spécifiques; la seule fréquence et la seule distinction entre textes écrits et oraux, toutefois, ne réussit pas à interpréter cette différente distribution selon un modèle cohérent. A cet effet, la mesure statistique de la gravité lexicale semble posséder une efficacité majeure, comme nous essayerons de démontrer. (shrink)

We show that the so-called quantum probabilistic rule, usually introduced in the physical literature as an argument of the essential distinction between the probability relations under quantum and classical measurements, is not, as it is commonly accepted, in contrast to the rule for the addition of probabilities of mutually exclusive events. The latter is valid under all experimental situations upon classical and quantum systems. We discuss also the quantum measurement situation that is similar to the classical one, described by the (...) Bayes formula. We show the compatibility of the description of this quantum measurement situation in the frame of purely classical and experimentally justified straightforward frequency arguments and in the frame of the quantum stochastic approach to the description of generalized quantum measurements. In view of derived results, we argue that even under experiments upon classical systems the classical Bayes formula describes particular experimental situations that are specific for context-independent measurements. The similarity of the forms of the relation between the transformation of probabilities, which we derive in the frame of the quantum stochastic approach and in the frame of the approach, based on straightforward frequency arguments, underlines once more that the projective (von Neumann) measurements represent only a special type of measurement situations in quantum physics. (shrink)

Brain stimulation techniques allow for the search of crucial areas for a given function. Not always convergent with neuroimaging, TMS studies have targeted parietal areas critical for quantity representation, spatio-numerical links, numerical and non-numerical quantity, finger gnosis and calculation. TMS data indicate the intraparietal sulcus and surrounding areas in the left and right hemisphere as crucial for quantity processing, although left hemisphere might be dominant. Bilateral parietal loci are essential for calculation and bilateral parietal areas are behind the spatio-numerical link, (...) which extends to frontal and posterior parietal sites. DCE studies to date have focused on the dominant hemisphere, have used calculation tasks and have found both dissociation and overlap between operations. An integrative view of positive findings and a focus on convergence and possible improvement is proposed. Although regularities are found between these techniques, more research is needed before arriving at conclusions that will have basic and clinical importance. (shrink)

Este trabajo se ocupa de la crítica de Platón a oradores, poetas y sofistas. Su propósito es mostrar que independientemente de las características que singularizan una batalla de vasto alcance librada por el filósofo en tres frentes distintos, la noción de imitación (mimesis) proporciona un hilo conductor que permite vincular esos diferentes enfrentamientos y arrojar luz sobre la reacción de Platón ante quienes identifica, peyorativamente, como imitadores. La práctica adulatoria del orador en Gorgias, no menos que el quehacer del poeta (...) puesto en tela de juicio en República y el del sofista en el diálogo homónimo tendrían, en efecto, una naturaleza mimética. Esto no impide reconocer, junto a los puntos de continuidad, diferencias significativas en los tratamientos de la mimesis que ofrecen los tres diálogos aquí considerados. (shrink)

It can certainly be said that history of science has experienced a large growth in recent decades in Spain. This has occurred despite the generic term ‘history of science’ covering activities of a very varied nature and lacking an intimate relation between each other, in research as well as instruction. At present the number of publications which could fit into the frame of this branch of learning has increased remarkably and commercial publishing houses have opened their editorial lists to the (...) publication of classics as well as to monographs on the history of science. Moreover, new specialized journals on these subjects have become popular and have joined the small number of journals which already had a certain tradition. The number of participants in the periodical congresses of the Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas [SEHCYT] has risen and the number of congresses and symposia that have been held in Spain and have assembled Spanish as well as foreign historians has also increased. As another recent promising detail, we could quote the presence of history of science in the curricula of Spanish university programmes, a presence that tends to increase progressively. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the role of epistemology in contemporary science study. According to the representatives of cultural approach to scientific cognition the latter should be considered regardless of the issues of falsity or truth, which excludes epistemology from the sphere of science investigation. The paper argues, that though the inquiry of science as an aspect of human culture is quite possible, this sort of analysis is insufficient. In order to understand the nature of scientific cognition one has to supplement it (...) by the results of epistemological consideration. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

The rise of East Asian Confucian heritage societies (China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore) has inspired an enormous amount of new empirical research. At the political level, one...

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, it captures the (...) confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

The subject of our article is the identification of cultural codes of Eastern European shtetl towns in the play by Grigory Gorin "Memorial Prayer", the libretto of which was written by the author based on the works of the famous Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. The author of the article describes the history and conditions of localization of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the peculiarities of its transformation, the tragic history of the Jewish theater in the first (...) third of the twentieth century. After the disappearance of the towns and the disuse of the Yiddish language, the preservation of the history of the characteristic everyday and philosophical way of life of the shtetls became the goal of museum figures, historians, writers, playwrights, and artists. In the work, using the example of Tevye the milkman, his family and environment, characteristic images of the inhabitants of small towns, their habitat, types of thinking and actions are revealed. The article uses the methods of historicism in the retrospective of the culture of Shtetl towns, the method of analysis in the identification of Shtetl archetypes, the method of synthesis in the generalization of a set of characteristic cultural codes. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. Eastern European Jewish shtetl towns are small urban-type settlements with a predominantly Jewish population, whose unique culture was determined by the Jewish faith, everyday and religious traditions, the Yiddish language, as well as the localization of residence in a small area. 2. During the period of large-scale social upheavals of the early twentieth century and the subsequent expansion beyond the boundaries of the towns, their unique culture became a mythologeme, the foundation for writers, artists, musicians, and theater figures who emerged from it. One of the milestones in the preservation of this culture was the Jewish theater GOSET, whose existence was tragically cut short in the middle of the twentieth century. 3. The play "Memorial Prayer", written by Grigory Gorin based on the works of Sholem Aleichem and staged at the Lenkom Theater by Mark Zakharov, became the quintessence of the characteristic images of the shtetl, and at the same time the revival of authentic Jewish culture. The author's special contribution is to highlight in the play the images-the archetypes of the Shtetl, which have become cultural markers, or codes of Jewish Yiddish culture. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

The red pill or the blue pill? Obviously the red. But are we sure it will work the way it is supposed to? Are we sure it will take us out of the Matrix? We are proud to announce that we have found a document that will throw some new light (and a renewed cloud of suspicion) on this matter: the product packaging of RedPill®, complete with all directions for use and warnings against side-effects.

Confucian meritocratic rule has been recently advocated on the basis of the economic performance of Western democracies and the political ignorance of their average voters. These arguments are grou...

: By introducing us into core concepts of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, Elena Esposito shows their relevance for contemporary social sciences and the study of unsettled times….

The first thesis of this article is that the concept of responsibility takes on an unprecedented meaning in the twentieth century resulting from the emergence of a new dimension of the other: to be responsible comes to mean not just to account for oneself in relation to the other, but also to take the other into account, to take care of the other—what I call responsibility towards (the other). The main reason for this change consists in the emergence of global (...) risks and the necessity, as underlined by Hans Jonas, to be responsible for the destiny of the world and future generations. The problem, as explored in the article’s second thesis, is that this implies the existence of a subject who is capable of responsibility. Jonas’s insights on this point are insufficient, since he only recognizes duty as the fundament for his ethics of responsibility and thus neglects the problem of motivation. This is a particularly crucial problem today as we are witnessing the presence of a pathological subject, characterized by a split in his faculties (between doing and imagining, knowing and feeling). To underline this fact, this article makes use of Günther Anders’s reflections, which provide a psycho-anthropological analysis of the subject, showing his pathologies and the necessity, from a moral perspective, to overcome his scission. Finally, this author suggests, as the article’s third thesis, that this overcoming is the necessary fundament for the perception of risk, which in turn reinstates the subject’s perception of his own vulnerability. Responsibility thus finds a motivation, which is neither altruistic nor duty-centred, in the awareness of our own vulnerability and the bond with the destiny of humankind as a whole. (shrink)

This paper addresses the phenomenological experience of precarity and vulnerability in racialized gender-based violence from a structural perspective. Informed by Indigenous social theory and anti-colonial approaches to intergenerational trauma that link settler colonial violence to the modalities of stress-inducing social, institutional, and cultural violences in marginalized women’s lives, I argue that philosophical failures to understand trauma as a functional, organizational tool of settler colonial violence amplify the impact of traumatic experience on specific populations. It is trauma by design. I explore (...) this through the history of the concept of trauma and its connection to tragedy. I give a brief overview of prominent theories of trauma and contrast these with the work of Indigenous feminist scholar Dian Million (2013), who highlights functional complicity of settler colonial institutions in shaping accounts of trauma in the west. I begin the piece with an important illustration of the kinds of lives and experiences that call for a politicized understanding of trauma in anti-colonial feminist theory. I end by offering an expansive notion of structural trauma that is a methodological pivot for conducting trauma-based gender-based violence research in a decolonial context, which calls for an end to narratives of trauma that are severed from the settler colonial project of Native land dispossession and genocide. [Volume 23, no.1]. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial performance for Islamic banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council region over the period 2000–2014 by generating CSR-related data through disclosure analysis of the annual reports of the sampled banks. The findings of this study indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the financial performance of Islamic banks in the GCC countries. The results also show a positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the future financial (...) performance of GCC Islamic banks, potentially indicating that current CSR activities carried out by Islamic banks in the GCC could have a long-term impact on their financial performance. Furthermore, despite demonstrating a significant positive relationship between the composite measure of the CSR disclosure index and financial performance, the findings show no statistically significant relationship between the individual dimensions of the CSR disclosure index and the current financial performance measure except for ‘mission and vision’ and ‘products and services’. Similarly, the empirical results detect a positive significant association only between ‘mission and vision’ dimension and future financial performance of the examined banks. (shrink)

Adam Ferguson’s imperial thought casts new light on the age-old republican dilemma of the tension between empire and liberty. Generations of republican writers had been haunted by this issue as the decline of Rome proved that imperial expansion would eventually ruin the liberty of a state. Many eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers regarded this as an insoluble conundrum and thus became critics of empire. Ferguson shared their basic views but, paradoxically, was still able to defend the British Empire in the debates over (...) the American Revolution. His argument effectively offered a viable solution to the republican dilemma, which distinguished him from his contemporaries. In light of this, I argue that political representation was the pivotal conception for Ferguson to make empire and liberty compatible. It was on this ground that he could advocate the union with Ireland, which he believed would lead to a lasting balance of power in Europe. -/- ; British Empire; liberty; balance of power; political representation; American Revolution; Anglo-Irish Union. (shrink)

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

Entrevista a Jean-Marie Schaeffer, realizada por Elena Yrigoyen, para la revista Aisthesis y la comunidad hispanohablante.

Entrevista a Jean-Marie Schaeffer, realizada por Elena Yrigoyen, para la revista Aisthesis y la comunidad hispanohablante.

Approaching mental health on a global scale with particular reference to low- and mid-income countries raises issues concerning the disregard of the local context and values and the imposition of values characteristic of the Global North. Seeking a philosophical viewpoint to surmount these problems, the present paper argues for a value-laden framework for psychiatry with the specific incorporation of value pluralism, particularly in relation to the Global South context, while also emphasizing personal values such as the choice of treatment. In (...) sketching out this framework, the paper aims to overcome the clash between universalism and relativism about psychiatric categories by focusing on how overlaps between cultures can contribute to ontology-building. A case study analyzing ethnopsychiatric research in the context of South India will illustrate the proposed view, while also pointing out avenues for further research on the causal efficacy of local shared beliefs about mental disorder. If approaches across different traditions and theoretical frames are shown to work in treating similar ailments, causal connections appear to cut across the different ontologies. Ethnopsychiatry would play a central role in such research, namely in disclosing the variables and mechanisms at work within the local approaches. (shrink)

Despite the increasing concern for the issue of respect for persons displayed over the last decades by political philosophers, human-right thinkers, social and ethical theorists, a comprehensive treatment of the problem at stake from a historical-philosophical perspective is conspicuously absent. The present collection of essays aims to contribute to the fulfillment of this gap by offering a reconstruction of the seminal passages in the history of philosophy which testify to the evolution of the idea of respect for persons and the (...) rich array of conceptual specifications that such an idea acquires across the centuries. By analysis of pivotal texts of ancient and modern contemporary philosophy, the volume will try to offer an articulated account of respect which, starting from its primeval connection with the search for esteem and the pursuit of human excellence, gradually evolves towards the recognition of the political status of each citizen and culminates into a true politics of human rights. Bringing together the expertise of classicists and scholars specialized in modern and contemporary philosophy, the volume is especially intended for scholars working in the fields of the history of philosophy, ethical and political theory. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds in two ways. First, I argue that Fanon’s structural witnessing of racism yields important insights about the nature of violence that challenges the settler colonial concept of violence as the extra-legal use of force. Second, I argue that his analysis of violence is insufficient for combating colonial racism and violence because, using the terms of his own analysis, it leaves intact logics and mechanisms that allow racism to structurally renew itself in perpetuity: violence against women. Without a (...) critical feminism that tracks the alterities of structural violence against women, and women of color in particular, Fanonianism is just another lifeline of colonialism. I thus caution against uncritical uses of Fanon’s structural account of violence for any emancipatory social theory that fails to acknowledge the attendant alterities, asymmetries, and axes of coordinated subordination involved in racialized violence against women. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)