This article examines Samantha Vice's essay ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, which sparked a storm of controversy in South Africa, as a starting point for interrogating understandings of whiteness and racism that are dominant in critical philosophy of race. I argue that a significant body of philosophical scholarship on whiteness in general and by white scholars in particular obfuscates the structural dimension of racism. The moralisation of racism that often permeates philosophical scholarship reproduces colourblind logics, which provide (...) individualistic explanations for structural problems, thereby sustaining white dominance. In the process, I show that notions of white guilt, white habits, white ignorance, white invisibility, white privilege, and white shame as they are theorised in much critical philosophy of race share a crucial limitation: they minimise white people's active interest in reproducing the racist status quo. Studies, such as Vice's, that frame racism as a moral dilemma while silencing its institutionalisation and the central cause for its existence and longevity – that is, white people's investment in maintaining economic, political, and symbolic power – further naturalise white supremacy. (shrink)

Human reproductive cloning has become the most palpable example of the globalization of science. Throughout the world, events and conjectures in the media, such as the birth and death in the United Kingdom of the cloned sheep Dolly and projects to clone human beings by Korean scientists, by members of the Canadian-based Raelian cult, and by the Italian physician Antinori in an undisclosed country, have galvanized the political will of individual countries to ban human reproductive cloning.Yet, international attempts to harmonize (...) policies in the area of biomedical ethics and human research, such as the 1997 Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, and most recently, the United Nations’ efforts to adopt an international convention against human reproductive cloning, have been insufficient to trigger a substantial global policy design process on issues relating to these new technologies. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of gender on the relative economic success of microentrepreneurs, their contributions to family income, and the impact of gender ideology and income on household decision making. The concept of economic success is problematized by examining how these businesses, even those of limited assets and income generation, offer women increased autonomy in household budgetary matters and decision making. The analysis draws on data from a representative survey of 201 male and female microentrepreneurs in the Dominican Republic. (...) The findings show that household decision making is influenced by variations in economic power but that gender ideologies structure the direction and extent of this influence, reflected in distinct “gender thresholds,” or the point at which income contributions start to matter. (shrink)

We investigate the interaction between the product of invariant types and domination–equivalence. We present a theory where the latter is not a congruence with respect to the former, provide sufficient conditions for it to be, and study the resulting quotient when it is.

We compute the domination monoid in the theory of dense meet‐trees. In order to show that this monoid is well‐defined, we prove weak binarity of and, more generally, of certain expansions of it by binary relations on sets of open cones, a special case being the theory from [7]. We then describe the domination monoids of such expansions in terms of those of the expanding relations.

We study the monoid of global invariant types modulo domination-equivalence in the context of o-minimal theories. We reduce its computation to the problem of proving that it is generated by classes...

In response to the difficult social, economic and political problems that Colombia faces, such as inequality, discrimination, weak civil society—fuelled by illegality and drug trafficking—the Colombian Ministry of Education has embarked on an ambitious citizenship education program, with the hope of strengthening the role of education by establishing alternative solutions. This innovative program attempts to counteract Colombians' recourse to violence as a means of solving the country's endemic problems by developing the competencies of students, teachers and other participants in education. (...) The competencies include sound reasoning, care for others, communication skills, reflection on action, knowledge and active participation in classroom, school and community matters. This six-and-a-half-year-old project has started to create an educational system that takes into account many of the elements and relationships fundamental to the socio-political and moral behaviour of all involved. The paper indicates the horizons that this program opens up and discusses some of the problematic aspects that still need to be addressed for the program to be sustainable. (shrink)

Para Gadamer, «el ser que puede ser comprendido es lenguaje», afirmación que implicaría que toda comprensión se da en la lingüisticidad. Por otra parte, afirma que si hay lingüisticidad, hay interpretación. Ahora bien, la cuestión que queda en entredicho en su obra es si esto implica que dicha lingüisticidad es concomitante con la comprensión, es decir, si en toda comprensión hay una mediación lingüística. El presente artículo busca indagar en el análisis de la palabra poética y la filosófica, para desde (...) tal análisis ver las posibilidades de resolución de la relación entre comprensión e interpretación. (shrink)

Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves (...) the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s well-known account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and thus is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts that include substantial gender-related psychological features, such as awareness of social expectations. Instead, our concept counts someone as being of a certain gender solely based on the person’s self-identification with this gender. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment by means of one’s gender identity. In this context, substantial psychological features and awareness of one’s social situation are involved. While previous accounts of concepts have focused on their role in determining extensions, we point to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important. (shrink)

The concept of solidarity has been receiving growing attention from scholars in a wide range of disciplines. While this trend coincides with widespread unsuccessful attempts to achieve solidarity in the real world, the failure of solidarity as such remains a relatively unexplored topic. In the case of the so-called European Union refugee crisis, the fact that EU member states failed to fulfil their commitment to solidarity is now regarded as established wisdom. But as we try to come to terms with (...) failing solidarity in the EU we are faced with a number of important questions: are all instances of failing solidarity equally morally reprehensible? Are some motivations for resorting to unsolidaristic measures more valid than others? What claims have an effective countervailing force against the commitment to act in solidarity? (shrink)

Para Suárez la ley es el acto de voluntad con el que el legislador obliga a sus súbditos a actuar como es debido ordenándoles hacerlo. Algunos intérpretes sostienen que según el jesuita la ley añadiría a una obligación preexistente una obligación adicional y específica, mientras que otros creen que para Suárez no existe obligación que no tenga en la ley su propia fuente y que, por consiguiente, antes de la ley no puede haber obligaciones, sino sólo deberes. En todo caso, (...) Suárez no parece capaz de explicar por qué el súbdito debería obedecer al legislador, ni tampoco por qué en efecto debería actuar como es debido. Por lo tanto, parece que se puedan compartir en su mayor parte las conclusiones bien conocidas de quien sostuvo que, una vez agotados los presupuestos metafísicos y antropológicos de la doctrina ética y jurídica de Tomás de Aquino, el intento suareciano de refundación de la obligación moral, jurídica y política no pudo, en última instancia, conseguir su objetivo. (shrink)

This chapter surveys essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of sex and gender. It does so by engaging three approaches to sex and gender: externalism, internalism, and contextualism. The chapter also draws attention to two key debates about sex and gender in the feminist literature: the debate about the sex/gender distinction (the distinction debate) and the debate about whether sex and gender have essences (the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate). In addition, it describes three problems that theories of sex and gender tend to face: the (...) Inclusion Problem, the Definition Problem, and the Exclusion Problem. Lastly, the chapter highlights why the division between essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of sex and gender is not clear. (shrink)

Ethical issues about children’s rights in respect of matters concerning resource allocation or treatment opportunities are now a matter for public consumption and concern. Alongside this exists a long-frustrated desire by children’s nurses to promote children’s health. Long-held assumptions about the legal and moral status of children within the health care system in this country are now rightly scrutinized and challenged. Those of us who claim to represent children now possess an opportunity to exploit public attention for the benefit of (...) these children. This article will explore selected major relevant legal and moral concepts that relate to children with the aim of making transparent some of the important and often confusing information available. It is anticipated that debates about the legal and ethical status of children may be stimulated and fuelled from the following discussion. It is strongly recommended that entering into dialogue with families and children about their perceived needs will go a long way towards advancing thoughtful nursing care of individual children, their families and the general population. (shrink)

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes a pivotal context (...) in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (1999, 2003) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 1989) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana. (shrink)

En el libro Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America, editado por Cecilia Macón, Mariela Solana y Nayla Luz Vacarezza, los/as autores/as ensayan y piensan sobre género y sexualidades en América Latina mediante una apuesta particular: los afectos y las emociones. Sobre este foco destaco tres retos de los varios señalados en su introducción: 1) la necesidad de descomponer la distinción razón/pasión para pensar conjuntamente cognición/sentimientos/emociones, así como la relación íntima entre afectos y política para intentar entender su inconmensurabilidad; 2) (...) el deseo de deconstruir las relaciones norte-sur y la circulación, traducción y apropiación de propuestas teóricas del norte global, develando que no es un puro gesto mimético o de simple aplicación a lo “local” sino un ejercicio translocal y multiespacial que interrumpe las lógicas de autenticidad o pureza en la producción de conocimientos y intentan un gesto singular: el de develar en travestismo y poner en tono con nuestras invenciones también impuras; y 3) la pertinencia de pensar, desde la mirada de los afectos, un contexto de avances feministas y neofascistas que disputan lo político, el orden de género y las claves de las sexualidades, antagonismos que requieren de una mirada que sepa leer y olfatear los ritmos, atmósferas y estéticas de configuraciones temporales y materiales diversas para problematizar nuestros tiempos. Me detengo en tres elementos que maravillan del libro y que aluden a estos desafíos: 1) la inmanente relación entre temporalidades y materialidades; 2) las metodologías (o juegos) y estéticas; y 3) el nudo del poder. (shrink)

Ce travail a pour objectif d'analyser les reflexions ä propos du droit et de la justice faites par Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo. L'objectif principal est de mettre l'accent sur les traits dominants qui distinguent ces reflexions quand elles touchent aux exigences de la praxis (juridique, ethique, politique), ä laquelle les deux philosophes s'adressent de fagon differente. D'un cöte, il y a la deconstruction deridienne, qui denonce le manque de fondement du droit, sa violence originelle, et au moyen d'une double (...) seance et un double mouvement se deplace en un exercice intellectuel lucide, radical et incessant; de l'autre, l'ontologie faible [debole) et nihiliste du philosophe italien dont la proposition est une hermeneutique qui n'en reste pas ä la phase de la denonciation mais veut "faire justice", de fagon pratique et concrete, en essayant d'affaiblir et de reduire peu ä peu la violence originelle du droit. (shrink)

Ce travail a pour objectif d'analyser les reflexions ä propos du droit et de la justice faites par Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo. L'objectif principal est de mettre l'accent sur les traits dominants qui distinguent ces reflexions quand elles touchent aux exigences de la praxis (juridique, ethique, politique), ä laquelle les deux philosophes s'adressent de fagon differente. D'un cöte, il y a la deconstruction deridienne, qui denonce le manque de fondement du droit, sa violence originelle, et au moyen d'une double (...) seance et un double mouvement se deplace en un exercice intellectuel lucide, radical et incessant; de l'autre, l'ontologie faible [debole) et nihiliste du philosophe italien dont la proposition est une hermeneutique qui n'en reste pas ä la phase de la denonciation mais veut "faire justice", de fagon pratique et concrete, en essayant d'affaiblir et de reduire peu ä peu la violence originelle du droit. (shrink)

The paper offers an interpretation of the role the concept of nationality plays in John Stuart Mill’s thought. To that purpose, I consider not only his best-known writings, but also those less frequently studied in the academic literature on that issue. The argument benefits from Quentin Skinner’s methodological insights into the study of the history of political thought. In that sense, I focus on Mill’s System of Logic textual revisions. In doing so, I briefly examine Mill’s intellectual and personal relationship (...) with Auguste Comte and hence the influence of positivism on Mill’s social and political thinking. (shrink)

Although much has been learned about hereditary mechanisms since Gregor Mendel’s famous experiments, gene concepts have always remained vague, notwithstanding their central role in biology. During over hundred years of genetic research, gene concepts have often and dynamically changed to accommodate novel experimental findings, without ever providing a generally accepted definition of the ‘gene.’ Yet, the distinction between ‘regulatory genes’ and ‘structural genes’ has remained a common theme in modern gene concepts since the definition of the operon-model. This distinction is (...) now challenged by recent findings which suggest that, at least in eukaryotes, structural genes may in many situations have a regulatory function that is independent of the function of the gene product (protein or non-coding RNA molecule). This brief paper discusses these new findings and some possible implications for the notion of the ‘regulatory gene.’. (shrink)

During the course of his long life, John Henry Newman made many friends—among them people to whom he was extremely devoted for decades. Maria Rosina Giberne was a family friend, whose friendship with Newman continued for over half a century. The present article looks at the development of this friendship as revealed in Newman’s correspondence for a decade and a half.