Interrogating the concepts of allegiance and identity in a globalised world involves renewing our understanding of membership and participation within and beyond the nation-state. Allegiance can be used to define a singular national identity and common connection to a nation-state. In a global context, however, we need more dynamic conceptions to understand the importance of maintaining diversity and building allegiance with others outside borders. Understanding how allegiance and identity are being reconfigured today provides valuable insights into important contemporary debates around (...) citizenship. This book reveals how public and international law understand allegiance and identity. Each involves viewing the nation-state as fundamental to concepts of allegiance and identity, but they also see the world slightly differently. With contributions from philosophers, political scientists and social psychologists, the result is a thorough appraisal of allegiance and identity in a range of socio-legal contexts. (shrink)

Book Information The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy Robert C. Solomon and David Sherman, eds., Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, viii + 345, $69.30 (cloth) Edited by Robert C. Solomon; and David Sherman. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. viii + 345. $69.30 (cloth:).

This discussion of Infinitely Demanding explores the terms of the paradox with which Critchley is centrally concerned: how an ethico-politics can at once begin in disappointment and yet allow for engagement, the infinite renewal of commitment and optimism. Placing this in critical relation to the paradox Rorty meets with his account of the "private ironist and public liberal" in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I argue that Critchley's ethico-politics invokes the possibility of a non-ironical categorical imperative, at the meeting point of finitude (...) and the infinite and at the heart of what is also a political space of intersubjectivity. I examine the logic of humour and of commitment within the Kantian frame thus suggested, arguing for their relevance to certain aspects of anarcho-activism, but also for their limitations in desperate circumstances, posing the risk that Critchley's preferred politics falls back into liberal complacency. (shrink)

Despite its place in the humanities, the career prospects and numbers of women in philosophy much more closely resemble those found in the sciences and engineering. This book collects a series of critical essays by female philosophers pursuing the question of why philosophy continues to be inhospitable to women and what can be done to change it. By examining the social and institutional conditions of contemporary academic philosophy in the Anglophone world as well as its methods, culture, and characteristic commitments, (...) the volume provides a case study in interpretation of one academic discipline in which women's progress seems to have stalled since initial gains made in the 1980s. Some contributors make use of concepts developed in other contexts to explain women's under-representation, including the effects of unconscious biases, stereotype threat, and micro-inequities. Other chapters draw on the resources of feminist philosophy to challenge everyday understandings of time, communication, authority and merit, as these shape effective but often unrecognized forms of discrimination and exclusion. Often it is assumed that women need to change to fit existing institutions. This book instead offers concrete reflections on the way in which philosophy needs to change, in order to accommodate and benefit from the important contribution women's full participation makes to the discipline. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

How might philosophically based counseling avoid becoming just one more form of private therapy, to be set alongside all the others now sold to individual consumers? Although several practitioners of philosophical counseling have sought to distinguish their approach from psychotherapeutic models, Foucault’s critique of the dominant modern model of ethical reflection might be used to argue for their essential continuity with one another, based on their common acceptance of the primacy of the imperatives of knowledge. Foucault turned in his late (...) writings to ancient Greek models of ethics as ‘care of the self ’, delineating a self-relation prior to knowledge. This paper argues for the interest and importance for philosophical counseling of the idea of ethics as ‘care of the self ’ in articulating a model of ethical reflection distinct from both rationalist and irrationalist tendencies in modern thought and focussed on self-mastery conceived as addressing our relation to otherness rather than as authenticity or autonomy. Moreover, the ‘aesthetics of existence’ that Foucault prescribes to the present has a significant and affirmative relationship to po­litical life; this distinguishes it from the private and individualistic project, dismissed by Foucault as ‘the Californian cult of the self ’, for which philosophical counseling can all too readily be mistaken. (shrink)

The current discourse on gender equity in universities most often situates itself in relation to eliminating bias and thus ensuring objectivity in rankings of excellence. With a focus on the discipline of philosophy, the article asks whether we thereby miss what it is important to contest but also cultivate in social worlds organized by their ever-partial and imperfect forms of discrimination in judgment? An approach based in efforts to engage in socio-political regulation of discrimination is proposed as advantageous.

How might we construe the demand that is posed by the circulation of photographic images in the contemporary world other than the sense that is given to these in contemporary cosmopolitanism, that is, as an extension of the realm of representation to a wider humanity? The ontological reading of the image and its way of marking life given here delineates an approach to the evidence that images present that de-centres the place of human subjectivity as the locus of meaning. Using (...) the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on the image, and Judith Butler on the apprehension of grievable life, the essay seeks to phrase the nature of a demand arising from the image, as that which exceeds an immediate or given context. It is this demand, I suggest, that is given in the non-representational aspect of the image, its circulation out of context. To heed this demand, I argue, is to attend to what Nancy terms “being-singular-plural” and Butler “grievable life,” and to move beyond the cosmopolitan form of vision toward what Derrida terms “hospitality.”. (shrink)

One challenge in providing an adequate definition of physical disability is unifying the heterogeneous bodily conditions that count as disabilities. We examine recent proposals by Elizabeth Barnes (2016), and Dana Howard and Sean Aas (2018), and show how this debate has reached an impasse. Barnes’ account struggles to deliver principled unification of the category of disability, whilst Howard and Aas’ account risks inappropriately sidelining the body. We argue that this impasse can be broken using a novel concept: marginalised functioning. Marginalised (...) functioning concerns the relationship between a person’s bodily capacities and their social world: specifically, their ability to function in line with the default norms about how people can typically physically function that influence the structuring of social space. We argue that attending to marginalised functioning allows us to develop, not one, but three different models of disability, all of which—whilst having different strengths and weaknesses—unify the category of disability without sidelining the body. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 1-4, December 2011.

Food-specific inhibition training (FSIT) is a computerised task requiring response inhibition to energy-dense foods within a reaction-time game. Previous work indicates that FSIT can increase the number of healthy foods (relative to energy-dense foods) children choose, and decrease calories consumed from sweets and chocolate. Across two studies, we explored the impact of FSIT variations (e.g., different response signals, different delivery modes) on children’s food choices within a time-limited hypothetical food-choice task. In Study 1, we varied the FSIT Go/No-Go signals to (...) be emotive (happy vs. sad faces) or neutral (green vs. red signs). One-hundred-and-fifty-seven children were randomly allocated to emotive-FSIT, neutral-FSIT, or a non-food control task. Children participated in groups of 4–15. No significant FSIT effects were observed on food choices (all values ofp> 0.160). Healthy-food choices decreased over time regardless of condition (p 0.050). Healthy choices decreased over time in the control group (p= 0.001) but did not change in the two FSIT groups (bothp> 0.300) supporting previous evidence that FSIT may have a beneficial effect on children’s food choices. Ensuring that children perform FSIT with high accuracy (e.g., by using FSIT in quiet environments and avoiding group-testing) may be important for impacts on food choices though. Future research should continue to explore methods of optimising FSIT as a healthy-eating intervention for children. (shrink)

Introduction to Special Issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Overview of the central issues in cognitive architecture, epistemology, and ethics surrounding cognitive penetrability. Special issue includes papers by philosophers and psychologists: Gary Lupyan, Fiona Macpherson, Reginald Adams, Anya Farennikova, Jona Vance, Francisco Marchi, Robert Cowan.

The current situation of women in philosophy is not rosy at all. There are a raising number of complaints from female philosophers about their working situation, about getting harassed, discouraged, isolated, or simply ignored. Numerous anecdotes are posted in online forums and weblogs, such as beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/or feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/. Apart from that, one can simply observe that much more men than women are employed in philosophical departments, give talks at philosophical conferences, and have articles published in philosophical journals. Katrina Hutchison and (...) class='Hi'>Fiona Jenkins have reacted to these problems and published a representative selection of essays on possible causes and remedies. Mainly, the book seeks to answer two questions: How does the exclusion of women in philosophy work? And what are we to do in order to improve the situation?Before I start the discussion, three preliminary remarks must be made. First, it is mentioned more than once i .. (shrink)

In the introduction to Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, editors, Fiona Jenkins and Katrina Hutchison, note that women in many fields of study feel frustrated, hurt, or merely annoyed at some of their experiences in academia. However, they also note something unusual about these feelings when it comes to philosophy: the feelings have given way “to careful reflection on how to make sense of such experience, how to find an articulation of its form, structure, causes, and (...) potential remedies” . That is the beauty and power of this book. The essays in this collection are not merely stories of women philosophers feeling mistreated , nor are they an angry call to arms for a feminist revolution. The women writing in this collection are careful to look at both data and the stories of women in philosophy to try to find the cause or causes of a problem that is already well-recognized. Moreover, a central question for almost all of the women .. (shrink)

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue (...) that this can make sense of some shame responses to racism. My account also helps to highlight some of the emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harms, contributing to a fuller picture of what is objectionable about racism. (shrink)