First published: 2010; Previous edition: 2012..

Why do racist oppression and capitalist exploitation often seem so inescapable and intractable? To describe and explain adequately the persistence of racist ideology, to specify its role in the maintenance of racial capitalism, and to imagine the conditions of its abolition, we must understand racist ideology as a form of false consciousness. False consciousness gets things “right” at the level of appearance, but it mistakes that appearance for a “deep” or essential truth. This chapter articulates a novel, positive account of (...) first-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about the world that are sustained and superficially justified by objective social arrangements, and of second-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about how one has come to hold the beliefs that one does. To dismantle racist ideology requires political movements that craft theoretical interventions highlighting the inessentiality and contingency of despised racial groups’ oppressed status, as well as practical interventions aimed at directly undermining the oppressive conditions that are reflected in racist beliefs about the “naturalness” or “appropriateness” of these groups’ degraded status. (shrink)

On first blush the Jim Crow Era may seem an odd place to locate anything meaningful about democratic, equal citizenship and the promise of the fourteenth amendment. This article argues to the contrary. The period of Jim Crow, in its negation of democratic citizenship, in fact reveals import aspects about the nature of democratic citizenship. This occurred in two ways. First, whites who implemented white supremacy implicitly understood that freedom and citizenship manifest themselves in a multiplicity of spheres, (...) which is why white supremacists sought to subordinate blacks not just politically but across all social spheres. Second, the resistance to comprehensive subordination revealed the multiplicity of the spirit of freedom and equality in actions and arguments African Americans. African Americans created spaces of democratic citizenship within the dominant culture of subordination. This article suggests that, in studying both the implementation of white supremacy and the resistance to it, we can learn more about how equal and democratic citizenship can be affirmed and implemented rather than negated, and also about the role of law as a tool for both subordination and resistance. (shrink)

This article is a critical race theology analysis that asserts that Catholic social teaching established in documents such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Populorum progressio, Caritas in veritate, and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s Contribution to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance justifies reparations for the state of oppression commonly called Jim Crow, or segregation society, from the US government because it denied African Americans “truly human conditions.”.

Virginia Foster Durr was born in 1903 in Birmingham, Alabama in a former planter class family, and in spite of the gradual decline in the family fortune, she was brought up as a traditional southern belle, utterly subjected to the demands of the ideology of white male supremacy that ruled the Jim Crow South. Thus, she soon learnt that in the South a black woman could not be a lady, and that as a young southern woman she was desperately (...) in need of a husband. It was not until she had fulfilled this duty that she began to open her eyes to the reality of poverty, injustice, discrimination, sexism and racism ensuing from the set of rules she had so easily embraced until then. In Outside the Magic Circle, Durr describes the process that made her aware of the gender discrimination implicit in the patriarchal southern ideology, and how this realization eventually led her to abhor racial segregation and the ideology of white male supremacy. As a consequence, in her memoirs she presents herself as a rebel facing the social ostracism resulting from her determination to fight against gender and racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South. This article delves into Durr’s composed textual self as a rebel, and suggests the existence of a crack in it, rooted in her inability to discern the real effects of white male supremacy on the domestic realm and in her subsequent blindness to the reality behind the mammy stereotype. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Across the Mexico-United States borderlands, overlapping white supremacist and Anglo-nationalist movements are building private walls as monuments to Donald Trump. Numerous social justice activists and ecological stewards have warned that these Trumpist border walls present specific and new threats to social and ecological landscapes, particularly along the riparian sections of the borderlands. To slow their building and even topple these walls, justice activists and ecological caretakers are working to fortify networks with similar efforts elsewhere. In an effort to provide (...) analyses useful to such justice endeavors, I employ Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to situate the borderland activist struggles against the Trumpist walls within a broader context of struggle against the commemoration of racist terror in the US South. Specifically, I use Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitical deathworlds to illustrate some potential common cause linking protests against Trumpist walls in the Paso del Norte region of the Mexico-US border with a Black Lives Matter/Say Her Name coalition that is bringing down Confederate monuments in central Texas. In placing these movements in connection with each other, I highlight a synergy of the white supremacy of Jim Crow with the Anglo nationalism behind a Juan Crow variant of racist terror and anti-immigrant hatred driving the Trumpist wall constructions. Recognition of this convergence is one way, I maintain, for identifying opportunities for making common cause across the Americas’ myriad struggles to destroy the racist monuments that glorify the necropolitical legacy of racist colonialism and its ongoing social and ecological devastation. (shrink)

In 2008 Robert Lovato coined the phrase Juan Crow. Juan Crow is a type of policy or enforcement of immigration laws that discriminate against Latino/as in the United States. This essay looks at the implications this phenomenon has for an ethics of immigration. It argues that Juan Crow, like its predecessor Jim Crow, is not merely a condemnation of federalism, but of any immigration reform that has stricter enforcement as one of its key components. Instead of (...) advocating for increased enforcement, I want to suggest that just immigration reform must adhere to two standards, equality of burdens and universal protections, and that only by doing so can the potential for Juan Crow be adequately avoided. (shrink)

Presenting portraits of many central figures in modern physics, including Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind, this critique of modern theoretical physics provides the latest ideas about the nature of physical reality while clearly distinguishing between fact and fantasy.

In this book, Jim Ruddy has proceeded deep into the hub-center of Husserl's transcendental subjectivity and unearthed an utterly new phenomenological method. A vast, originative a priori science emerges for the reader. Ruddy presents a unique and powerful eidetic science wherein the object consciousness of Husserl is suddenly shown to point beyond itself to the ultimate theme of the pure subject consciousness of God as He is in Himself. Thus, the book opens up an endlessly new, unrestricted realm of objective (...) material for phenomenology to exfoliate and describe. This is an important work for both general phenomenologists and for scholars of Husserl, Aquinas, and Edith Stein. (shrink)

"Shepard may be the best lesser-known film critic." —The New York Times Book Review The first book of nonfiction from one of our great fiction writers. Given that most Americans proudly consider themselves non-political, where do our notions of collective responsibility come from? Which self-deceptions, when considering ourselves as actors on the world stage, do we cling to most tenaciously? Why do we so stubbornly believe, for example, that our country always means well when intervening abroad? The Tunnel at the (...) End of the Light argues that some of our most persistent and destructive assumptions, in that regard, might come from the movies. In these ten essays Jim Shepard weaves close readings of film with cultural criticism to explore the ways in which movies work so ubiquitously to reflect how Americans think and act. Whether assessing the “high-spirited glee of American ruthlessness” captured in GoodFellas, or finding in Lawrence of Arabia a “portrait of the lunatic serenity of our leaders’ conviction in the face of all evidence and their own lack of knowledge,” he explores how we enter into conversations with specific genres and films—Chinatown, The Third Man, and Badlands among others—in order to construct and refine our most cherished illusions about ourselves. (shrink)

This paper briefly addresses questions of confirmation and disconfirmation in psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis enjoys Bayesian support as an interpretive extension of commonsense psychology that provides the best explanation of a large range of empirical data. Suggestion provides no such explanation, and recent work in attachment, developmental psychology, and neuroscience accord with this view.

Illuminating new essays on Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowing.

This paper investigates the effect of the countervailing forces within organizations of formal systems that direct employees toward ethical acts and informal systems that direct employees toward fraudulent behavior. We study the effect of these forces on deception, a key component of fraud. The results provide support for an interactive effect of these formal and informal systems. The effectiveness of formal systems is greater when there is a strong informal “push” to do wrong; conversely, in the absence of a strong (...) push to do wrong, the strength of formal systems has little impact on fraudulent behavior. These results help to explain why the implementation of formal systems within organizations has been met with mixed results and identifies when formal systems designed to promote ethical behavior will be most efficacious. (shrink)

While historians of art have found death masks and life casts conceptually problematic, it is also noteworthy that these objects have received scant attention from philosophers of art. In this paper, I begin to redress this omission by offering examples of how the philosophy of art can help us understand these images. Two problems stand out: the problem of representation, for example, what type of representation a death mask is; and the problem of style and historicity, for example, whether images (...) imprinted from nature can indicate styles, and whether these images can evolve and transform along art-historical lines. After considering these problems, I conclude that these images are constrained in what they can and cannot represent. While there is a long tradition of imprinting from nature, this practice shows little discernible change over time. An unchanging tradition cannot claim to exhibit a history, a least in a narrative sense familiar to art history. The following investigation opens a dialog between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and practitioners of theoretical art history, including Ernst Gombrich and Georges Didi-Huberman, both of whom offer differing views on how these images can be treated. (shrink)

This paper argues that psychoanalysis enables us to see mental disorder as rooted in emotional conflicts, particularly concerning aggression, to which our species has a natural liability. These can be traced in development, and seem rooted in both parent-offspring conflict and in-group cooperation for out-group conflict. In light of this we may hope that work in psychoanalysis and neuroscience will converge in indicating the most likely paths to a better neurobiological understanding of mental disorder.

It’s never too early to give young boys a resource that will help them learn the skills for making right choices in life. A Boy’s Guide to Making Really Good Choices is designed to help boys ages 8-12 learn how to think through their options, realize the possible consequences, and develop good decision-making skills. In this book, Jim George uses helpful stories and illustrations to walk boys through the kinds of choices they are likely to face each day—choices to... listen (...) to their parents do their best in school, sports, and activities select friends with care be kind to siblings and others help out at home and use good manners Through the use of real-life scenarios, Jim George equips boys to build good character—the kind that will stay with them for life and honor God’s standards. (shrink)

This paper considers clinical psychoanalysis together with developmental psychology (particularly attachment theory), evolution, and neuroscience in the context a Bayesian account of confirmation and disconfrimation. -/- In it I argue that these converging sources of support indicate that the combination of relatively low predictive power and broad explanatory scope that characterise the theories of both Freud and Darwin suggest that Freud's theory, like Darwin's, may strike deeply into natural phenomena. -/- The same argument, however, suggests that conclusive confirmation for Freudian (...) hypotheses, as in the case of Darwin's, will come from outside the original domain of explanation sketched out by Freud. As in Darwin's case conclusive confirmation came from understanding the physical mechanisms or reproduction, in Freud's case it will come from understanding the neural mechanisms that realise the phenomena described in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This book is based on the assumption that "organic has lost its way". Paradoxically, it comes at a time when we witness the continuing of growth in organic food production and markets around the world. Yet, the book claims that organic has lost sight of its first or fundamental philosophical principles and ontological assumptions. The collection offers empirically grounded discussions that address the principles and fundamental assumptions of organic farming and marketing practices. The book draws attention to the core principles (...) of organic and offers different clearly articulated and well-defined conceptual frameworks that offer new insights into organic practices. Divided into five parts, the book presents new perspectives on enduring issues, examines standards and certification, gives insights into much-discussed and additional market and consumer issues, and reviews the interplay of organic and conventional farming. The book concludes with a framework for rethinking ethics in the organic movement and reflections on the positioning of organic ethics. (shrink)

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

Contemporary discussions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind are dominated by the presupposition of naturalism. Arguing against this established convention, Jim Slagle offers a thorough defence of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (EAAN) and in doing so, reveals how it shows that evolution and naturalism are incompatible. Charting the development of Plantinga's argument, Slagle asserts that the probability of our cognitive faculties reliably producing true beliefs is low if ontological naturalism is true, and therefore all other beliefs produced (...) by these faculties, including naturalism itself, are self-defeating. He critiques other well-known epistemological approaches, including those of Descartes and Quine, and deftly counters the many objections against the EAAN to conclude that epistemological naturalism should be rejected on the grounds of self-defeat. By situating Plantinga's argument within a wider context and showing that science and evolution cannot entail naturalism, Slagle renders this most common metaphysical view irrational. As such, the book advocates an important reconsideration of contemporary thought at the intersection of philosophy, science and religion. (shrink)

This book offers a unique perspective on meaning in language, broadening the scope of existing understanding of meaning by introducing a comprehensive and cohesive account of meaning which draws on a wide range of linguistic approaches.

A Green Beret's profound spiritual transformation from PTSD to awakening and from military warrior to spiritual warrior.

In 1993, Jim Mason, journalist, advocate, and pioneering figure in the contemporary animal advocacy movement, published An Unnatural Order-a sweeping overview of the origins of our hatred and destruction of the natural world and its creatures, from the dawn of agriculture to the present day. Now fully revised and updated to reflect developments in paleoanthropology and ethology, as well as greater awareness of, and urgency regarding, the climate crisis, An Unnatural Order offers an expansive overview of what has changed (both (...) for good and for ill) and what has unfortunately remained the same. His message is clear: until we grapple with the question of the animal, and our relationship with animality and the natural world, we will not be able to confront the consequences of our perpetuation of environmental destruction, biodiversity collapse, and our alienation from the Earth and one another. As brilliantly polemical and richly descriptive as it was when it was published almost three decades ago, this new version of An Unnatural Order is sure to excite a passionate debate about our role in either saving the ecosystems upon which all species (including our own) rely, or bringing it all to an end. (shrink)

In The Other Half of Church, pastor Michel Hendricks and neurotheologian Jim Hendricks couple brain science and the Bible to identify how to overcome spiritual stagnation by living a full-brained faith. They also identify the four ingredients necessary to develop and maintain a vibrant transformational community where spiritual formation occurs, relationships flourish, and the toxic spread of narcissism is eradicated.

Getting inside Tully's Head -- Unraveling the threads in Edmund Burke's vindication of natural society -- Dodsley's Irishman : Edmund Burke's Ireland and the British Republic of Letters -- Patriot criticism : from the ridiculous to the sublime in Burke's philosophical enquiry -- Burke's history.

Explaining the world's greatest mysteries.