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Diversity Reading List

Helping you include authors from under-represented groups in your teaching

Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Publisher’s Note: This is the first comprehensive account of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant’s views with those of his German contemporaries, and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant’s philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent a radical transformation in the mid 1790s and that the resulting theory is philosophically stronger than is usually thought. Using the work of figures such as Fichte, Cloots, Forster, Hegewisch, Wieland, and Novalis, Kleingeld analyzes Kant’s arguments regarding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, the importance of states, the ideal of an international federation, cultural pluralism, race, global economic justice, and the psychological feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal. In doing so, she reveals a broad spectrum of positions in cosmopolitan theory that are relevant to current discussions of cosmopolitanism.

Posted in Applied Ethics, Culture, Freedom and Rights, JusticeTagged cosmopolitan right, cosmopolitanism, global justice, international federation, international relations, Kant, patriotism, race, world citizenshipLeave a comment

Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions ofunderclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory.

Posted in Culture, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality, Social Epistemology, Theoretical EpistemologyTagged emotions, epistemology, feminism, knowledgeLeave a comment

The Semantics of Racial Epithets

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism. CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection

Posted in Communication, Ethics and Socio-Politics of Language, Grammar and Meaning, RaceTagged race, semanticsLeave a comment

Refining Feminist Theory: Lessons from Aesthetics

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: Because it embraces a domain that is invincibly pluralistic and dynamic, aesthetic theory can serve as a model for feminist theory. Feminist theory, which takes gender as a constituted point of departure, pluralizes theory, thereby challenging its unicity. This anomalous approach to theory is also implicit in conventional aesthetics, which has for that reason been spurned by centrist philosophy. Whilst aesthetics therefore merits attention from feminists, there is reason to be wary of such classic aesthetic doctrines as the the thesis that art is “autonomous” and properly percevied “disinterestedly”. That belief has roots in somatophobic dualism which ultimately leads to consequences as negative for art and the aesthetic as for women. Feminists rightly join with other critics of traditional dominative dualisms; yet they can learn from the expansive tendency in aesthetics toward openness and self-reflexive innovation.

Posted in Applied Ethics, Culture, Ethics and Socio-Politics of Aesthetics, Forms of Government, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality, Justice, Law and Public Policy, Mental States and Processes, RaceTagged feminist aesthetics, race, sexualityLeave a comment

The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke a Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Publisher’s Note: In its comprehensive overview of Alain Locke’s pragmatist philosophy this book captures the radical implications of Locke’s approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke’s works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed

Posted in Artistic Movements, Artistry and Creativity, Culture, Education, Equality, Individual Arts and Crafts, Justice, Race, Work, Labor, and LeisureTagged culture, pragmatism, raceLeave a comment

Dressing down Dressing up – The Philosophic Fear of Fashion

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: There is, to all appearances, a philosophic hostility to fashionable dress. Studying this contempt, this paper examines likely sources in philosophy’s suspicion of change; anxiety about surfaces and the inessential; failures in the face of death; and the philosophic disdain for, denial of, the human body and human passivity. If there are feminist concerns about fashion, they should be radically different from those of traditional philosophy. Whatever our ineluctable worries about desire and death, whatever our appropriate anger and impatience with the merely superficial, whatever our genuine need to mark off the serious from the trivial, feminism may be a corrective therapy for philosophy’s bad humor and self-deception, as these manifest themselves when the subject turns to beautiful clothes.

Posted in Aesthetic Experience and Judgement, Aesthetic Normativity and Value, Artistry and Creativity, Culture, Ethics and Socio-Politics of Aesthetics, Freedom and Rights, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality, Justice, Law and Public PolicyTagged aesthetics, feminist aesthetics, philosophy of genderLeave a comment

In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Publisher’s Note: In this timely book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation’s rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude’s mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics. According to Glaude, Dewey’s pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life – or what we often speak of as the blues – can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black, or that short-circuit imaginative responses to problems confronting actual black people. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, In a Shade of Blue seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking, and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity, Glaude argues, can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied. Heady, inspirational, and brimming with practical wisdom, In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century

Posted in Culture, Equality, Ethics and Socio-Politics of Philosophy, Freedom and Rights, Justice, RaceTagged America, pragmatism, race, social justiceLeave a comment

Feminist Art History and De Facto Significance

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: In her excellent “Feminist Art History and De Facto Significance,” for example, aesthetician Susan L. Feagin explains how her initial skepticism about Continental approaches-especially those drawing on Foucault, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and “even Derrida and poststructuralist literary theory” – gave way to an appreciation of how these approaches encourage, in a way analytic aesthetics does not, “the trenchant analyses and acute observations that have emerged from feminist art historians” (305). And, indeed, although she goes on to suggest how traditional aesthetics might accommodate feminist and other politically informed analyses, she cautions that “it is too easy to miss the most innovative aspects of another’s view if one tries to understand it only in terms of one’s own theoretical perspective” (305).(from review by Sally Markowitz, Hypatia Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 169-172)

Posted in Aesthetic Experience and Judgement, Aesthetic Normativity and Value, Culture, Freedom and Rights, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality, Justice, Law and Public PolicyTagged feminist aestheticsLeave a comment

Art and Intimacy

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Publisher’s Note: To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love.It all begins with the human trait of birthing immature and helpless infants. To ensure that mothers find their demanding babies worth caring for, humans evolved to be lovable and to attune themselves to others from the moment of birth. The ways in which mother and infant respond to each other are rhythmically patterned vocalizations and exaggerated face and body movements that Dissanayake calls rhythms and sensory modes.

Rhythms and modes also give rise to the arts. Because humans are born predisposed to respond to and use rhythmic-modal signals, societies everywhere have elaborated them further as music, mime, dance, and display, in rituals which instill and reinforce valued cultural beliefs. Just as rhythms and modes coordinate and unify the mother-infant pair, in ceremonies they coordinate and unify members of a group.

Today we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity, and fecundity, that affected their survival. Now we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in artlike behavior, then we actually need the arts. Even — or perhaps especially — in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things.

Posted in Aesthetic Experience and Judgement, Aesthetic Normativity and Value, Individual Arts and Crafts, Mental States and Processes, Metaphysics of AestheticsTagged evolutionary aesthetics, motherhood, origins of artLeave a comment

Feminist philosophy of art

Posted on January 20, 2020December 3, 2024 by Simon Fokt

Abstract: This article outlines the issues addressed by feminist philosophy of art, critically surveys major developments in the field, and concludes by considering directions in which the field is moving.

Posted in Aesthetic Experience and Judgement, Aesthetic Normativity and Value, Artistry and Creativity, Culture, Ethics and Socio-Politics of Aesthetics, Freedom and Rights, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality, Justice, Law and Public PolicyTagged aesthetics, art, feminist philosophyLeave a comment

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