Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

We investigate a novel use of the English temporal modifier ‘now’, in which it combines with a subordinate clause. We argue for a univocal treatment of the expression, on which the subordinating use is taken as basic and the non-subordinating uses are derived. We start by surveying central features of the latter uses which have been discussed in previous work, before introducing key observations regarding the subordinating use of ‘now’ and its relation to deictic and anaphoric uses. All of these (...) data, it is argued, can be accounted for on our proposed analysis. We conclude by comparing ‘now’ to a range of other expressions which exhibit similar behavior. (shrink)

This essay discusses Rae Langton’s recent collection of essays, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification. After introducing some of the major themes of the collection, I raise questions about two of the central concepts in the book. The first question has to do with Langton’s notion of subordination. I ask why she takes pornography to be a subordinating speech act, rather than a subordinating practice, and argue that the latter view has several advantages. The remaining questions have (...) to do with Langton’s notion of objectification. Looking first at the moral dimension of objectification, I raise some concerns about Langton’s strategy for distinguishing instances of objectification from non-instances. Then, turning to Langton’s discussion of the epistemic dimension of objectification, I ask under what circumstances certain belief-forming mechanisms, such as desire-driven projection, are objectifying, on her view. (shrink)

In analytic philosophy, the concept of trust is often considered primarily to be a three-place relation between trustor, trustee, and the domain of trust. The analysis of trust is unsatisfactory, however, if such a relationship is derivative of other forms of trust, and consequently the analysis has only succeeded in explaining a particular branch of trust rather than explaining the root. Annette Baier considers a climate of trust, with all the moral perils of intimacy, explanatorily superior to contract-based, rational trust (...) between non-intimate equals in modern Western philosophy and thus provides an example of how the traditional analytic model is problematic. In this paper, I propose another account on which the conventional three-place trust relationship investigated in analytic philosophy is derivative. Based on Heidegger's fundamental ontology, humans are constitutively hermeneutic. If Heidegger's fundamental ontology or a similar hermeneutic anthropology is accepted, then trust relationships between humans are explanatorily subordinated to trust relationships between readers and texts rather than the other way around, as traditional accounts suggest. This reversal has a significant impact not only on our analysis of trust, but also on moral theory, personal identity, and scientific method. My paper details both the reversal in explanatory primacy and the implications for these philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

Frances Kamm has for some time now been a foremost champion of non-consequentialist ethics. One of her most powerful non-consequentialist themes has been the idea of inviolability. Morality's prohibitions, she argues, confer on persons the status of inviolability. This thought helps articulate a rationale for moral prohibitions that will resist the protean threat posed by the consequentialist argument that anyone should surely be willing to violate a constraint if doing so will minimize the overall number of such violations. As Kamm (...) put it in a 1992 article, ‘If morality permitted minimizing violations of persons by violating other persons, then each of those saved as well as those persons used to save others would be less inviolable. It is the permission, not any actual violation of persons, that makes this so.’ Now, as thus baldly asserted, this claim borders on the conclusory. It is almost as if the claim were that morality conferred on persons the following status: that of being protected from consequentialism. One wants to hear in what inviolability consists, in more detail, so that we can understand it independently of the negation of consequentialism. And there is also an opposite problem: if inviolability is a good, then why can't consequentialism take it into account? Hence, one also wants to hear why this would not be the case. (shrink)

The concept of non-domination is an important contribution to the study of freedom but it does not comprehend the whole of freedom. Insofar as domination requires a conscious capacity for control on the part of the dominant party, it fails to capture important threats to individual freedom that permeate many contemporary liberal democracies today. Much of the racism, sexism and other cultural biases that currently constrain the life-chances of members of subordinate groups in the USA are largely unconscious and unintentional, (...) and they do not always involve control. Although they constitute real barriers to freedom, these forms of influence are not accurately characterized as domination, and they will require different mechanisms to overcome them. To achieve the more capacious freedoms that liberal democracy promises, we will need to go beyond non-domination and to come to terms with the non-sovereign, socially distributed character of human agency. (shrink)

In this work we will study Tarski algebras endowed with a subordination, called subordination Tarski algebras. We will define the notion of round filters, and we will study the class of irreducible round filters and the maximal round filters, called ends. We will prove that the poset of all round filters is a lattice isomorphic to the lattice of the congruences that are compatible with the subordination. We will prove that every end is an irreducible round filter, (...) and that in a topological subordination Tarski algebra A, every irreducible round filter is an end iff A is a monadic subordination Tarski algebra. As corollary of this result we have that the variety of monadic Tarski algebra can be characterised as the topological Tarski algebras where every irreducible open filter is a maximal open filter. (shrink)

Frances Kamm has for some time now been a foremost champion of non-consequentialist ethics. One of her most powerful non-consequentialist themes has been the idea of inviolability. Morality's prohibitions, she argues, confer on persons the status of inviolability. This thought helps articulate a rationale for moral prohibitions that will resist the protean threat posed by the consequentialist argument that anyone should surely be willing to violate a constraint if doing so will minimize the overall number of such violations. As Kamm (...) put it in a 1992 article, ‘If morality permitted minimizing violations of persons by violating other persons, then each of those saved as well as those persons used to save others would be less inviolable. It is the permission, not any actual violation of persons, that makes this so.’ Now, as thus baldly asserted, this claim borders on the conclusory. It is almost as if the claim were that morality conferred on persons the following status: that of being protected from consequentialism. One wants to hear in what inviolability consists, in more detail, so that we can understand it independently of the negation of consequentialism. And there is also an opposite problem: if inviolability is a good, then why can't consequentialism take it into account? Hence, one also wants to hear why this would not be the case. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to extend the Leszek Nowak's theory of socialist empire by introducing weaker forms of intersocial relation, e. gr. unsuccessful attempt at conquest and subordination. In the light of concretization of the model of socialist empire some facts from history of Soviet Union (intervention of the Entente and World War II) and socialist countries (autonomy of Albania and Romania in socialist bloc) are explained.

In this work, we study the relational representation of the class of Tarski algebras endowed with a subordination, called subordination Tarski algebras. These structures were introduced in a previous paper as a generalisation of subordination Boolean algebras. We define the subordination Tarski spaces as topological spaces with a fixed basis endowed with a closed relation. We prove that there exist categorical dualities between categories whose objects are subordination Tarski algebras and categories whose objects are (...) class='Hi'>subordination Tarski spaces. These results extend the known dualities for modal algebras. Finally, we are going to characterise some algebraic conditions written in the quasi-modal language by means of first-order conditions. (shrink)

Abusive supervision, defined as subordinates’ perception of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and non-verbal behaviors, excluding physical contact, is associated with various negative outcomes. This has made it easy for researchers to overlook the possibility that some supervisors regret their bad behavior and express remorse for their actions. Hence, we know little about how subordinates react to the perception that their supervisor is remorseful and how this perception affects the outcomes of supervisors’ (...) undesired behavior. Specifically, drawing on the social exchange theory and displace revenge literature, this study explains how abusive supervision leads to victims’ service sabotage behavior. In addition, this study also investigates how perceived supervisors’ remorse mitigates the adverse effects of abusive supervision. Based on time-lagged, dyadic data from Chinese individuals, this study found support for all the proposed relationships, i.e., abusive supervision leads to service sabotage through the mediating effect of revenge desire. The findings also conclude that PSR lessens the detrimental effects of abusive supervision on victims’ behavior with their customers. Finally, this research contributes to service sabotage literature by highlighting the possibility where abusive supervisors cause service sabotage behavior among victims. This study also shows the importance of PSR’s role in decreasing service sabotage behavior exhibited by victims of abusive supervisors in the service sector. (shrink)

Prior research on citizenship behavior has mainly focused on its voluntary side—organizational citizenship behavior. Unfortunately, although compulsory behavior is a global organizational phenomenon, the involuntary side of CB—compulsory citizenship behavior, defined as employees’ involuntary engagement in extra-role work activities that are beneficial to the organization : 77–93, 2006)—has long been neglected and very little is known about its potential negative consequences. Particularly, research on CCB–counterproductive work behavior association is still in its nascent stage. Therefore, drawing on moral disengagement theory and (...) social exchange theory, we firstly attempt to systematically investigate how and when CCB leads to CWB. Specifically, we see employee silence as a critical form of passive CWB and propose a moderated mediation model. In the model, CCB predicts silence through MD—a set of cognitive mechanisms that deactivate moral self-regulatory processes, with the Chinese culture-specific concept of supervisor–subordinate guanxi, which captures the supervisor–subordinate non-work-related personal ties, acting as the contextual condition. Two-wave data collected from a sample of 293 employees in 17 manufacturing firms in China supported our hypotheses. The results revealed that the more employees experienced compulsory feelings caused by CCB, the more they morally disengaged and, in turn, resorted to avoidant or passive responses as a coping strategy. Further, s–s guanxi serves as a reverse moderator in that high s–s guanxi mitigates the destructive impact of CCB, makes employees less inclined to morally disengage, and thereby largely prevents them from practicing workplace silence behavior. Implications for theory and intervention strategies for practice are discussed. We also propose several promising avenues for future research. (shrink)

The Kurdish-led autonomous entity called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria - also known as Rojava - considers women?s liberation an imperative condition for shaping a democratic society. The practice of autonomy in NES shares strong resemblances with Non- Territorial Autonomy models; however, it introduces a novelty in the role of women as active agents in building a plurinational democracy. This paper examines the intellectual and political origins of the political role ascribed to women in autonomous administrations and how (...) the practice of autonomy in Rojava has advanced women?s rights by shedding light on both institutional implementation of women?s rights, as well as the creation of -territorial spaces of women?s emancipation within the autonomous model. The argument made is that the conceptual framework of the Rojava model goes beyond the Kurdish question and can be considered an attempt to resolve a democratic deficit of liberal democratic nation-states through bringing together solutions that address the intertwined subordination of minorities and women. nema. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the social history of health and medicine in colonial India has moved beyond enclavist or hegemonic aspects of imperial medicine and has rather focused on the role of Indian intermediaries and the fractured nature of colonial hegemony. Drawing inspiration from this scholarship, the article highlights the significance of the Indian subordinates in the lock hospital system in the nineteenth century Madras Presidency. This study focuses on a class of Indian subordinates called the “gomastah”, who were employed to (...) detect clandestine prostitution in Madras to control the spread of venereal disease. It also underlines the role of other native and non-native subordinates such as Dhais, Chowdranies and Matrons, the ways in which they became indispensable for the smoother operation of the Contagious Diseases Act and the lock hospitals on a day-to-day basis. By emphasising how Indian subordinates were able to bring in caste biases within colonial governmentality, adding another layer to the colonial prejudices and xenophobia against the native population, it underlines the fact that there was not a one-way appropriation or facilitation of the coloniser’s knowledge or biases by the colonised intermediaries. Rather, it argues for an interaction between them, and highlights the complexities of caste hierarchies and prejudice within the everyday colonial governmentality. Moreover, the article focuses on the consequent chaos and inherent power struggle between different factions of colonial staff. (shrink)

Leadership is considered as a significant antecedent of knowledge hiding in SMEs, but the differential dimension of leadership has been evidently neglected in both theoretical and empirical areas. Drawing on conservation of resource theory and social cognitive theory, this research investigates whether and how SME differential leadership influences subordinate knowledge hiding. Specifically, we analyze the underlying mechanisms of a chain-mediator—job insecurity and territorial consciousness and a boundary condition—leadership performance expectation. Multi-wave and multi-source data were collected from a sample of 704 (...) Chinese SME employees and 140 relevant leaders and applied HLM meso-mediational frameworks, and Bootstrap technique with non-parametric percentile residuals for deviation correction. The results show that differential leadership plays a potential role in promoting subordinate knowledge hiding through the serial intervening mechanism of job Insecurity and territorial consciousness in SMEs. Furthermore, the positive relationship between SME differential leadership and job insecurity becomes stronger among subordinates under higher leadership performance expectation; the positive indirect relationship between SME differential leadership and subordinate knowledge hiding is stronger with higher levels of leadership performance expectation. This study contributes to the existing academic literature by empirically analyzing the under-investigated correlation between differential leadership and subordinate knowledge hiding in SMEs, and by exploring the underlying mechanisms and a boundary condition. (shrink)

Cornelius Castoriadis understood history as a self-creating order. In turn, he elaborated history in two directions: as the political project of autonomy, and as the ontological modality of the social-historical. On his account, history as self-creation was only possible through the interplay of social (or political) imaginaries and social doing. Although social imaginaries are readily situated within the non-subjective field, non-subjective modes of doing have been less explored. Yet non-subjective contexts are integral to both the “doing” and “imaginary” dimensions of (...) the human condition, and form the preconditions for concrete varieties of social and political action and politics (as la politique), more generally. The present paper begins to clear a path to reflect on social doing in its non-subjective aspects; as such, it is preparatory rather than programmatic. After briefly reviewing the field of “social imaginaries”, it reflects on Castoriadis’s elaboration of “praxis” and “teukhein”. It then considers Johann Arnason’s culturological reconfiguration of Castoriadis’s approach, and Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology of the movement of human existence as different ways of engaging with the problematic of doing, instituting society and political imaginaries. Despite a gradual subordination of “doing” to “signification” in Castoriadis’s philosophical elaborations, “social doing” as a non-subjective modality does not disappear altogether from his thought – especially and explicitly in respect to the phenomenon of instituting society as a political project – and remains a point of recurring intrusion into his more explicit theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This study compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian accounts. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. The republican ideal of non-domination can thus be fruitfully understood in light of the (...) Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (Beisichsein) in another’. However, while the Hegelian view converges with Pettit on non-domination and recognition, their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. One key difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception dependence of freedom. -/- Keywords: Pettit; Hegel; freedom; non-domination; mutual recognition; republicanism; ‘being at one with oneself’; social freedom. (shrink)

Although the presence of cognitive values in science has been accepted for half a century, until recently it was claimed that the presence of non-cognitive values threatened the rationality and objectivity of science and it was a sign of a scientist’s weakness. This view appeared to be correct when cognitive and non-cognitive values were treated dichotomously, and science was seen as a set of theories and procedures. The analysis of science as a social practice shows however that this dichotomy cannot (...) be maintained and that the scientist, when planning and conducting research, makes assumptions which include value judgments encompassing certain non-cognitive values. Ignoring the presence of non-cognitive values does not secure objectivity and rationality of science. On the contrary, since they are constitutive elements of scientific research, pretending that they do not work in research exposes science to ideologization. Rational subordination of science to them becomes a vehicle and a warrant of not only rationality but also objectivity and social responsibility of science. This in turn allows us to restore the proper place of science in culture. (shrink)

This article draws analogies between the making of norms by contract, often seen as typical of private law, and by subordinate law-making, often seen as a typically public function and for public bodies. These analogies are set in the context of those rules which govern the relations between universities and their students, as the same types of rule may find their source in a range of legal sources: prescription, royal charter, parliamentary legislation or contract. Of these different sources, the common (...) law courts long accepted that chartered corporations, created by exercise of royal prerogative, were entitled to make subordinate legislation (known as byelaws) for the furthering of their purposes for both members and non-members, despite this law-making being extra-parliamentary. This article suggests how this power to make byelaws in chartered corporations may apply to chartered universities, noting the difficulties arising from the allegedly eleemosynary nature of these bodies and from the possible coexistence of statutory powers. It then examines the way in which the contract between a student and a university arises, and how this contract may form the legal basis of student rules, whether these rules are conceived as terms of the contract itself or as expressions of a unilateral power in the university arising from the contract. A subsequent article will compare the review of student rules on the grounds of public law principle and of contractual regulation. (shrink)

We introduce a variety of algebras in the language of Boolean algebras with an extra implication, namely the variety of pseudo-subordination algebras, which is closely related to subordination algebras. We believe it provides a minimal general algebraic framework where to place and systematise the research on classes of algebras related to several kinds of subordination algebras. We also consider the subvariety of pseudo-contact algebras, related to contact algebras, and the subvariety of the strict implication algebras introduced in (...) Bezhanishvili et al. [(2019). A strict implication calculus for compact Hausdorff spaces. Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 170, 102714]. The variety of pseudo-subordination algebras is term equivalent to the variety of Boolean algebras with a binary modal operator. We exploit this fact in our study. In particular, to obtain a topological duality from which we derive the known topological dualities for subordination algebras and contact algebras. (shrink)

Polarization often happens asymmetrically. One political actor radicalizes, and the results reverberate through the political system. This is how the deep divisions in contemporary American politics arose: the Republican Party radicalized. Republican officeholders began to use extreme legislative tactics. Republican voters became animated by contempt for their political rivals and by the defense of their own social superiority. The party as a whole launched a wide-ranging campaign of voter suppression and its members endorsed violence in the face of electoral defeat. (...) This paper is about how such asymmetric polarization affects everyone else’s obligations. My core claim is that two kinds of relationship – civic friendship and non-subordination – underpin critical democratic norms. Republican misbehavior has severed cross-partisan civic friendships. Their authoritarianism forfeits their claim to non-subordination. The former means that non-Republicans need not justify policy on public grounds. The latter undercuts Republicans’ claim to enjoy minority vetoes when out of power and it gives their rivals reason to disobey the laws that Republicans make when they are in power. More generally, when one political actor contravenes the proper norms of democratic politics, their opposition is not bound by those norms. (shrink)

Is, or has, democracy a universal value? This is the main question raised by this paper, which distinguishes between two aspects of democracy: political institution in opposition to despotism, and political belief against any kind of slavery and subordination. The role played by intellectuals in the development of contemporary democracy, and the relation of democracy to mass culture and the influence of mass media on a true democratic attitude, are studied within the frame of an overall 'mass aesthetization' which (...) characterizes contemporary societies. (shrink)

In the United States, convicted offenders frequently lose the right to vote, at least temporarily. Drawing on the common observation that citizens of color lose democratic rights at disproportionately high rates, this chapter argues that this punishment is problematic in non-ideal societies because of the way in which it diminishes the political power of marginalized groups and threatens to reproduce patterns of domination and subordination, when they occur. This chapter then uses the case of penal disenfranchisement to illustrate how (...) idealized discussions of deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution often ignore the relationship between punishment and social/political power, and thus systematically obscure morally significant aspects of our broader penal practices. (shrink)

The theory of beauty has always rested on the representation of the infinite, understood in its finite expression and perceptible through the senses. The relationship of beauty to truth, of art to science, is inevitably modified with the new way of treating the infinite in the modern conception of the world. Non-classical science works with the notions of “infinitely large” and “infinitely small,” modifying their meanings in terms of experimental observations. We put these words in quotation marks because the Whole (...) may be considered as finite or infinite according to the angle from which it is viewed: the “infinitely small” only becomes so in determined circumstances, for example, when we consider the extended and discrete elements of space and time in a macroscopic approximation, as infinitely small elements of perpetual motion. Modern science studies these two poles of being—the Whole and its parts—in their interaction, admitting the dependence of macroscopic and even cosmic processes with regard to the processes being created in infinitely small spheres (or, according to another interpretation, finite but extremely small). However, as characteristic of our time as these concepts are—most often hypothetical—they nonetheless express a very old historical tradition that contemporary retrospection, turned toward classical science and the past of science in general, allows us to discern very clearly. All the culture of the past was dominated by the principle of the authority of the Whole over its parts. In peripatetic cosmology and physics, individual processes depended on the cosmic harmony of the center and frontiers of the universe, on the spheres and places toward which bodies tend. This authority of the general law, of universal harmony, of the system hinging on individual processes, is confirmed in Aristotle's Physics, but not only there: we find it in almost all the thinkers of antiquity. On the plane of general logic, it received expression in the Hegelian concept of the true infinite, a concept constituting to a high degree the philosophical equivalent of classical science. In Hegel's time, this last was already drawing away somewhat from the idea of an absolute and strict subordination of elementary processes to integrating systems and general laws, laws being realized through the probability of microprocesses, thus statistical laws, and whose exact application ignored individual acts, for example, the mechanism of molecules in thermodynamics. The statistical theory of heat has rendered continual a discrete microcosm—for the movement of individual molecules it substituted the average speed of the molecules—and continual laws became supreme points determining macroscopic processes. These laws had a differential nature. In other words, they prescribed the defined relationships between the infinitely small increases in size. Also, the schema of the classic law consisted in defining infinitely small processes by an infinitely large integral legality because of the number of processes. The infinitely true of Hegel is the actual infinite being realized in each of its finite elements; it is the subjection of the finite element to the infinite. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the social history of health and medicine in colonial India has moved beyond enclavist or hegemonic aspects of imperial medicine and has rather focused on the role of Indian intermediaries and the fractured nature of colonial hegemony. Drawing inspiration from this scholarship, the article highlights the significance of the Indian subordinates in the lock hospital system in the nineteenth century Madras Presidency. This study focuses on a class of Indian subordinates called the “gomastah”, who were employed to (...) detect clandestine prostitution in Madras to control the spread of venereal disease. It also underlines the role of other native and non-native subordinates such as Dhais, Chowdranies and Matrons, the ways in which they became indispensable for the smoother operation of the Contagious Diseases Act and the lock hospitals on a day-to-day basis. By emphasising how Indian subordinates were able to bring in caste biases within colonial governmentality, adding another layer to the colonial prejudices and xenophobia against the native population, it underlines the fact that there was not a one-way appropriation or facilitation of the coloniser’s knowledge or biases by the colonised intermediaries. Rather, it argues for an interaction between them, and highlights the complexities of caste hierarchies and prejudice within the everyday colonial governmentality. Moreover, the article focuses on the consequent chaos and inherent power struggle between different factions of colonial staff.ZusammenfassungDie jüngere Forschung zur Sozialgeschichte der Gesundheit und Medizin im kolonialen Indien hat sich jenseits spezifischer hegemonialer Aspekte der imperialen Medizin mittlerweile verstärkt der Bedeutung ihrer indischen Vermittler und der gebrochenen Natur kolonialer Herrschaft zugewandt. Davon inspiriert beleuchtet der Beitrag die Rolle indischer Subalterner im System der Krankenhäuser für Geschlechtskrankheiten der Provinz Madras im 19. Jahrhundert. Er fokussiert auf die so genannten „Gomastah“, eine Klasse von indischen Untergebenen, die zur Aufdeckung der illegalen Prostitution in Madras eingesetzt wurden, um so die Ausbreitung von Geschlechtskrankheiten zu verhindern. Untersucht wird auch die Rolle anderer einheimischer und nicht einheimischer Untergebener wie der Dhais, Chowdranies und Matrons, die für die reibungslose Umsetzung des Contagious Diseases Act und das alltägliche Funktionieren dieser Krankenhäuser unverzichtbar waren. Indem herausgearbeitet wird, wie indisches Kastendenken in die koloniale Gouvernementalität einfließen konnte und so koloniale Vorurteile und Xenophobie stärkte, unterstreicht der Artikel die Tatsache, dass es keine einseitige Aneignung oder Vermittlung kolonialen Wissens und kolonialer Vorannahmen durch die kolonisierten Vermittler gab. Argumentiert wird vielmehr für deren Interaktion, betont wird die komplexe Bedeutung des Kastensystems und seiner Vorurteile für das alltägliche koloniale Regierungshandeln. Zudem befasst sich der Beitrag mit dem daraus resultierenden Chaos und den inhärenten Machtkämpfen zwischen verschiedenen Gruppierungen des kolonialen Personals. (shrink)

It is unclear how children learn labels for multiple overlapping categories such as “Labrador,” “dog,” and “animal.” Xu and Tenenbaum suggested that learners infer correct meanings with the help of Bayesian inference. They instantiated these claims in a Bayesian model, which they tested with preschoolers and adults. Here, we report data testing a developmental prediction of the Bayesian model—that more knowledge should lead to narrower category inferences when presented with multiple subordinate exemplars. Two experiments did not support this prediction. Children (...) with more category knowledge showed broader generalization when presented with multiple subordinate exemplars, compared to less knowledgeable children and adults. This implies a U-shaped developmental trend. The Bayesian model was not able to account for these data, even with inputs that reflected the similarity judgments of children. We discuss implications for the Bayesian model, including a combined Bayesian/morphological knowledge account that could explain the demonstrated U-shaped trend. (shrink)

This essay will examine Gandhian ahimsa in its inseparability from truth. In this context, it will take issue with those who have argued that Gandhian ahimsa was either (entirely or in part) drawn from Tolstoy or (entirely or in part) from the anekantavada of the Jains; arguing that while Gandhi was influenced by both these sources, his ahimsa was drawn (in his own admission) from an altogether different source, i.e. from the metaphysics and ethics of the Bhagavad Gita. Even if (...) one were to disregard for the moment the differences between Gandhi and the other interpreters of the Gita (specially from those who were his contemporaries), Gandhi’s drawing of ahimsa as non-violence and a non-passionate universal love from the context of the war between cousins in the Gita might seem surprising. Gandhi’s contemporaries like Tilak and Sri Aurobindo (among others) had argued that the Gita had justified the exception to the law of harmlessness for the sake of duty and suggested that the aim of the Gita was to undertake a critique of the ethical and confirm it’s subordination to the political. Gandhi however had argued (to the contrary) that the metaphysics of oneness in the Gita brought out in the vision of Sri Krishna’s divine form recommended both desireless action and absolute ahimsa; given that to harm anyone or anything in the universe was, quite literally, to harm oneself. (shrink)

Although it has been recognized that employees regularly engage in non-green behaviors, little research has been conducted to explain how these behaviors may be avoided. Using data from a three-wave study, this study tested a moderated-mediation model in which trust in the immediate manager was expected to increase the indirect effect of supervisory support for the environment on non-green behaviors through employee environmental commitment. While the findings showed, as predicted, that exchange relationships with the immediate manager reduce the tendency of (...) employees to engage in non-green behaviors, the indirect effect of supervisory support on non-green behaviors through employee environmental commitment was moderated at a low level of trust in the manager, contrary to predictions. Though unexpected, this result seems less surprising when discussed in the light of negotiated exchange, suggesting that employee efforts to avoid non-green behaviors need to be seen as the result of a deal between managers and subordinates. The findings of this study contribute to the emerging literature on social exchange in an environmental context and have implications for organizations seeking to achieve environmental sustainability. (shrink)

Scholars of race in antiquity commonly claim that Aristotle holds protoracist views about barbaroi or non-Greeks. But a careful examination of Aristotle's remarks in his Politics about slavery, non-Greek political institutions, and Greek and non-Greek natural qualities calls into question such claims. No doubt, Aristotle held views at odds with modern liberalism, such as his views about gender subordination and the exploitation of slave and nonslave labor. But claims that Aristotle holds protoracist views are regularly but erroneously asserted without (...) careful consideration of relevant textual evidence. I argue that Aristotle neither categorically distinguishes Greeks and non-Greeks nor does he endorse the claim that Greeks are categorically superior to non-Greeks. Indeed, Aristotle regularly draws upon non-Greek political institutions in his own formulation of the best constitution and he praises the non-Greek constitution of Carthage as superior to that of Greek constitutions such as Sparta and Crete. (shrink)

Scholars of race in antiquity commonly claim that Aristotle holds proto-racist views about βάρβαροι or non-Greeks. But a careful examination of Aristotle’s remarks in his Politics about slavery, non-Greek political institutions, and Greek and non-Greek natural qualities calls into question such claims. No doubt, Aristotle held views at odds with modern liberalism, such as defenses of gender subordination and the exploitation of slave and non-slave labor. But claims that Aristotle holds proto-racist views are regularly but erroneously asserted without careful (...) consideration of relevant textual evidence. My article argues that Aristotle neither categorically distinguishes Greeks and non-Greeks nor does he endorse the claim that Greeks are categorically superior to non-Greeks. Indeed, Aristotle regularly draws upon non-Greek political institutions in his own formulation of the best constitution and he praises the non-Greek constitution of Carthage as superior to that of Greek constitutions such as Sparta and Crete. (shrink)

Scholars of race in antiquity commonly claim that Aristotle holds proto-racist views about βάρβαροι or non-Greeks. But a careful examination of Aristotle’s remarks in his Politics about slavery, non-Greek political institutions, and Greek and non-Greek natural qualities calls into question such claims. No doubt, Aristotle held views at odds with modern liberalism, such as defenses of gender subordination and the exploitation of slave and non-slave labor. But claims that Aristotle holds proto-racist views are regularly but erroneously asserted without careful (...) consideration of relevant textual evidence. My article argues that Aristotle neither categorically distinguishes Greeks and non-Greeks nor does he endorse the claim that Greeks are categorically superior to non-Greeks. Indeed, Aristotle regularly draws upon non-Greek political institutions in his own formulation of the best constitution and he praises the non-Greek constitution of Carthage as superior to that of Greek constitutions such as Sparta and Crete. (shrink)

According to German legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch, laws that are substantively unjust to an intolerable degree should not be regarded as legally valid, even if they were promulgated according to stipulated procedure. Radbruch’s Formula (as his position has been termed) contradicts the central tenet of legal positivism, according to which the existence of laws does not necessarily depend on their merit.1 While some legal positivists suppose that legal invalidity based on the content of particular laws is a central tenet of (...) natural law theory,2 natural law theorists such as John Finnis opine that the lex injusta non est lex3 maxim has been no more than a subordinate theorem of classical natural law theory.4 In Finnis’s view, unjust laws give rise to legal obligation “in a legal sense.”5. (shrink)

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

In recent years there has been great attention paid to the so-called Italian theory in the field of political philosophy. This definition has brought to the fore Italian thinking, but at the same time also covers many reflections of the past several decades, by creating a category easily disclosable but also restricted to a few authors and topics. To this regard, I want to highlight the philosophical work of Ubaldo Fadini, professor of philosophy at the University of Florence, who for (...) many years has been dedicated to the German and French philosophical tradition, crossing different disciplines and combining aesthetic and ethical issues to frame the subjectivity and the institutions into the post-Fordist era. -/- Since his work is multi-faceted and broad, I would suggest first reading Il desiderio in America (The desire in America) for his ‘achipelago-politics’. Fadini addresses the issue of desire in Deleuze with an approach that escapes the opportunity and claim to be an interpretive key from which to see everything systemically. His work wisely touches on several authors and issues, from Kafka to Melville, Spinoza and Nietzsche, and many others, addressing the dynamics of a desire, debt, conscience, responsibility and law. These are, therefore, multiple inputs to desiring, which does not hide the dotted plurality of the brothers in the world, beyond the tight grip of the Oedipal triangle, i.e. the father-mother-child relationship. It follows a not only a psychological issue but also a political one, thus it regards the delineation of a field of forces in which ‘who’ acts – and speaks – is not only the person (a term which in Latin refers to theatrical mask, but well-defined identity fictitious necessary to enter the scene and carry on a story), but the scene itself, produced by relations not illuminated by the light of the show. The plural world of the brothers is the American one, in which the Oedipal relationship with the father-homeland is cut in the name of equality, contrary to colonial subjection (of which Fanon has also shown the psychic character revealing the mechanism of the colonized that internalized the oedipal function of the dominus. Fanon, in fact, has linked the production of subjectivity employee with the apparatus of colonial subordination). -/- To this aside to Deleuzian thought, Fadini adds another, but productively connects to the first: from the cut with the father was not born the son (as in Hegelian-Lacanian interpretation or dialectical-psychoanalytic who wants the definition of the son from by the conflict with his father), but the brothers, the concrete manifold in which the father is not necessary but is placed from time to time in the decision-making function of the uncertainty, in the mobile uncertainty of the brothers in their organization. That this is happening is not a scandal. That this would represent a danger, as Fadini states, is a necessary point to be aware. Maybe, the problem arises when this function is preached the need: no, the fathers are not necessary. And even mothers. We reiterate: it is a political issue around which affirms or denies the legal capacity of the many in favor of the one. The one may be different persons: those who came before, the old, the wise, the priest who runs the border between the world and underworld with the rules applied on the swinging from one place to another, the legislature, the owner. The reason why the scope of the one is so problematic is mainly related to the mechanism he establishes so to ex-istere. It is a mechanism for fault-liability-debt, such as a pyramid which is based on a ‘primary’ concept, namely that of the absence. The paternal function certainly sums up everything in a person: the father is the legislator, he was there before, is older, closer to the world of the dead, but even in that of the living, owns the world, provides rules – even interpretation – to be applied to the fluctuations of life. A really great invention, no doubt about it, higher than that of basileus-priest, more functional, yes, more functional. -/- As in The Wizard of Oz, a narrative that is served in an American election campaign and, as Graeber reminds us, explains the necessity of the idea of debt so to found the new relationship between money and gold, the legislator is microscopic compared to the effects of the conviction that is produced on a large scale, not only on his community but also on the foreigners who come to him in search of completeness. The vacuum is once again an instrument of domination, nothing else. Lack of confidence, of course. Lack of confidence in the ability of the brothers. In the story of The Wizard of Oz, the wizard was well-intentioned and therefore the trick is revealed, however, he reaffirms his role by giving foreigners a certificate of completion that settles the existential debt. Lack of confidence and perhaps even the reading of fairy tales. We don’t need ‘real’ narrations but concrete tales, and, as Fadini says, archipelagos and pirates and cartographers. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism — the theory that makes individual responsibility central to distributive justice, so that bad luck underwrites a more compelling case for redistribution than do the bad choices of the disadvantaged — has recently come under a sustained attack from critics who are deeply committed to the broader struggle for equality. These egalitarian critics object, first, that luck egalitarianism’s policy recommendations are often unappealing. Second, they add that luck egalitarianism neglects the deep political connection between equality and non-subordination, (...) in favor of a shallowly distributive regime. This Article argues that both objections to luck egalitarianism have been exaggerated. Insofar as the criticisms are accurate, they apply only to a particular, maximalist strand of luck egalitarianism, whose distributive principle does not merely adjust allocations in light of responsibility but instead proposes that allocations should precisely track responsibility. However, this responsibility-tracking view does not represent the best or truest development of the basic luck egalitarian ideal. Moreover, the pathologies of the responsibility-tracking view help to cast the appeal of more judicious luck egalitarianism into sharp relief. The redistributive policies that more moderate developments of luck egalitarianism recommend are less objectionable than critics have supposed. And, more importantly, such modest luck egalitarianism is not a purely distributive ideal but instead contains, at its core, a vision of political solidarity among free and equal citizens. (shrink)

Aristotle’s biology is based on his method of division of animal kinds by multiple differentiae. This results in complex clusters of non-subordinate terms, between which Aristotle seeks to establish universal correlations. The form of these, however, does not correspond to that prescribed by his theory of syllogism. Mereological relations between terms are not linear and quantification is far more complex than the distinction between universal and particular propositions. Thus the axiomatisation of Aristotle’s biology requires a tool designed for analysing such (...) complex universal correlations into valid syllogistic premises. Prosleptic-like premises turn out to be the solution outlined by Aristotle. They make it possible to handle both the logic of consequence which translates from and into mereological relations between term clusters, and the complex quantification required by division based on multiple differentiæ, through the instantiation of a variable ideally consisting of indivisible groups of animals. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the justifiability of both concealed uses of executive prerogative as consistent with the end of self-preservation for which government is constituted by the people and its disobedient disclosure as consistent with the rational interest of the citizens of the constitutional state in non-subordination. Indeed, I argue both prerogative and disclosure are justifiable, despite the latter clearly operating at cross-purposes with the former. I also contend that disobedient disclosure aligns more closely with the justificatory conditions (...) of executive prerogative than more traditions forms of civil disobedience. My discussion is limited to the question of justification, highlighting the normative stakes of delegitimizing either mode of extra-legal discretionary judgment by executive or disclosers respectively. (shrink)

According to Arendt and Habermas, the reinterpretation of Aristotle made by Thomas Aquinas, identifying politicus and socialis, has weakened the nature of classical Aristotelian politics by introducing in the polis relations and private interests that the Greeks had reserved for domestic space. Moreover, being the concept of societas in this context naturally Christian, the purpose of society is no longer self-sufficiency and acquisition of natural virtue, which allow us to live together in order to the good life, but requires supernatural (...) virtue given by God in order to achieve the true supreme good. Therefore, the possibility of happiness now refers to eschatology, reason because kings are to be subject to priests, especially the pope, Christ’s representative, whose role is to take care of the highest aim of our existence. However, the application of a pyramidal and hierarchical scheme of spiritual power over the temporal realm is subverted by Juan Quidort of Paris, introducing a «small» shift: the kingdom understood as perfecta multitudo. In this perfect multitude an upward causality is the basis for distinction and non-subordination of the temporal power by the spiritual; at the same time freedom of individuals to choose their leaders is essential. This view undermines the dynastic transmission’s model of power in a kingdom as well as, at the ecclesial level, points to superiority of the General Council in relation to the pope. (shrink)

I had an unexpected encounter on a far island off the coast of Australia with a group of young people. These young people wanted to escape from the modern world and they inspired my conviction: that we must do our best to reshape our world and make it a place acceptable for the younger generation. I realized that it is the dominant consciousness of an epoch that creates the structures and the practices of an epoch. We must now address the (...) task of evolving or co-evolving our world's dominant consciousness. The fear and insecurity produced by this current dominant consciousness has created humanity's current sad condition. The Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University declares its mission to be a ?state of the art? global institution. It has the clear-cut objective of fostering a new consciousness, defeating ignorance, and providing an affordable world-class education that permits economically less privileged people to take an active part in the construction of a better world. Our first tenet is the bio-epistemological ?non- subordinate? horizontal model of education. This tenet is joined with our commitment to a cross-cultural social, interdisciplinary, and stereo-cognitive interaction-based academic platform. It is a platform that can empower young people to attain an innovative holistic view of the world and of themselves. (shrink)

The chapter considers two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former points to a distinction between will and modal verbs, seeming to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter, conversely, suggests that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, the chapter proposes that will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn’t contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is introduced in the interpretation (...) of a will-sentence through a supervaluational strategy universally quantifying over possible futures. That this is not part of will’s lexical semantics is shown to have consequences that ultimately contribute to explain Stalnaker’s Asymmetry. Furthermore, that a modal quantification is present in the interpretation of a will-sentence is shown to imply the availability of modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. (shrink)

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

This paper argues that liberal freedom (non-interference) is epistemologically prior to republican freedom (non-domination). I start investigate three relations between liberal and republican freedom: (i) Logical Equivalence, or the question whether republican freedom entails liberal freedom (and vice versa); (ii) Degree Supervenience, or whether changes in the degree (amount, quantity) of republican freedom are mirrored by changes in the degree of liberal freedom (and vice versa); and (iii) Epistemological Priority, that is, whether knowledge about arrangements of republican freedom presupposes knowledge (...) about arrangements of liberal freedom. If Logical Equivalence holds, liberals are right to claim that republicans have not introduced a new concept of freedom. It is easy to see, though, that Logical Equivalence does not hold. If Degree Supervenience holds, liberals can maintain that while republican freedom is a new concept of freedom, fostering or promoting it is not very different from fostering or promoting liberal freedom. Degree Supervenience does not hold either, though, and as a result two straightforward counterarguments against republican freedom fail. Yet, I argue, first, that the relation of Epistemological Priority holds: knowing something about arrangements of republican freedom presupposes that you know something about arrangements of liberal freedom. Using Epistemological Priority, I show, second, that the benefits claimed for republican freedom over and above liberal freedom (it minimizes the need for strategic deference, it minimizes uncertainty, and it minimizes subordination) can be accounted for in purely liberal terms. (shrink)

Spinoza ’s letter of June 2, 1674 to his friend Jarig Jelles addresses several distinct and important issues in Spinoza ’s philosophy. It explains briefly the core of Spinoza ’s disagreement with Hobbes’ political theory, develops his innovative understanding of numbers, and elaborates on Spinoza ’s refusal to describe God as one or single. Then, toward the end of the letter, Spinoza writes: With regard to the statement that figure is a negation and not anything positive, it is obvious that (...) matter in its totality, considered without limitation [indefinitè consideratam], can have no figure, and that figure applies only to finite and determinate bodies. For he who says that he apprehends a figure, thereby means to indicate simply this, that he apprehends a determinate thing and the manner of its determination. This determination therefore does not pertain to the thing in regard to its being [esse]; on the contrary, it is its non-being [non-esse]. So since figure is nothing but determination, and determination is negation [Quia ergo figura non aliud, quam determinatio, et determinatio negatio est], figure can be nothing other than negation, as has been said. Arguably, what is most notable about this letter is the fate of a single subordinate clause which appears in the last sentence of this passage: et determinatio negatio est. That clause was to be adopted by Hegel and transformed into the slogan of his own dialectical method: Omnis determinatio est negatio. Of further significance is the fact that, while Hegel does credit Spinoza with the discovery of this most fundamental insight, he believes Spinoza failed to appreciate the importance of his discovery. The issue of negation and the possibility of self-negation stand at the very center of the philosophical dialogue between the systems of Spinoza and Hegel, and in this paper I will attempt to provide a preliminary explication of this foundational debate between the two systems. In the first part of the paper I will argue that the “determination is negation” formula has been understood in at least three distinct senses among the German Idealists, and as a result many of the participants in the discussion of this formula were actually talking past each other. The clarification of the three distinct senses of the formula will lead, in the second part of the paper, to a more precise evaluation of the fundamental debate between Spinoza and Hegel regarding the possibility of self-negation. In this part I will evaluate the validity of each interpretation of the determination formula, and motivate the positions of the various participants in the debate. (shrink)

Religion emerged among early humans because both purposive and non-purposive explanations were being employed but understanding was lacking of their precise scope and limits. Given also a context of very limited human power, the resultant foregrounding of agency and purposive explanation expressed itself in religion’s marked tendency towards anthropomorphism and its key role in legitimizing behaviour. The inevitability of death also structures the religious outlook; with ancestors sometimes assigned a role in relation to the living. Subjective elements such as the (...) experience of dreams and the internalization of moral precepts also play their part. Two important sources of variation among religions concern the adoption of a dualist or non-dualist perspective, and whether or not the religion’s early political experience is such as to generate a systematic doctrine subordinating politics to religion. The near ubiquity and endurance of religion are further illuminated by analysis of its functions and ideological role. Religion tends to be socially conservative but has the potential to be revolutionary. (shrink)

The study considers development and use of verb/predicate chaining constructions by Hebrew speakers from early childhood to adolescence, based on analysis of authentic conversational and narrative corpora. Three types of such constructions are considered, ordered hierarchically by stage of acquisition: (1) monoclausal extended predicates consisting of a verb (modal, aspectual, or evaluative) marked for tense or mood and followed by one or more complements in the infinitive – e.g., yaxol la-asot ‘can, is able to-do’; (2) coreferential interclausal predicate chaining; and (...) (3) mature discursively-motivated topic-chaining. Relevant typological features of Modern Hebrew are reviewed to explain the lack of canonic clause-chaining construction in the language (e.g. the paucity of non-finite constructions in everyday usage, lack of an uninflected basic form of verbs, lack of auxiliary verbs expressing categories of aspect and voice, and monolexemic verb-internal complexity). Monoclausal verb-chaining emerges early in the speech of toddlers in interaction with their caretakers, whereas predicate chaining by coordination across clauses occurs only later, and chunking of such constructions at the service of discourse connectivity is a late-developing device. Nonfinite subordination is an advanced form of clause-combining, in contrast to straightforward subordination with the multifunctional subordinator še’that’. The conclusion is that, unlike the obligatorily fused monoclausal “extended predicates”, bi- and multi-clausal predicate chaining represents an optional rhetorical choice on the part of a given speaker-writer in a particular communicative context. (shrink)

Realists and non-ideal theorists currently criticise Rawlsian mainstream liberalism for its inability to address injustice and political conflict, as a result of the subordination of political philosophy to moral theory, as well as an idealising and abstract methodology. Seeing that liberalism emerged as a theory for the protection of the individual from conflict and injustice, these criticisms aim at the very core of liberalism as a theory of the political and therefore deserve close analysis. I will defend Judith N. (...) Shklar’s liberalism of fear as an answer to these challenges. I will argue that the liberalism of fear maintains realism’s conflictual and inherently political thrust while also integrating a perspective on injustice. I will defend the claim that in contrast to the two aforementioned criticisms, the liberalism of fear develops its own normative standard from which political arrangements can be assessed. It does so by replacing the idealising approach to political philosophy with a non-utopian methodology, which opens a negative perspective on what is to be avoided in the political sphere, and how to detect and deal with injustice. Due to this standard, it is a liberal theory that is uniquely able to meet the realist and non-ideal challenge. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation of the theory of time and the theory of truth in Deleuze’s philosophy. According to Deleuze, a mutation in our conception of time occurred with Kant. In antiquity, time had been subordinated to movement, it was the measure or the “number of movement” (Aristotle). In Kant, this relation is inverted: time is no longer subordinated to movement but assumes an independence and autonomy of its own for the first time. In Deleuze’s phrasing, time becomes the (...) pure and empty form of everything that moves and changes — not an eternal form (as in Plato), but precisely the form of what is not eternal. In turn, the theory of time is inextricably linked to the concept of truth, since to say that a proposition is true means that it is true “in all times and in all places.” Truth, in other words, is timeless, eternal, non-temporal. When the form of the true is confronted with the form of time, the concept of truth is necessarily put into crisis, and Deleuze’s argument is that time allows the power of the false to assume an autonomy of its own. The analysis will attempt to show how the liberation of time from movement (the pure and empty form of time) leads to a liberation of the false from the true (the power of the false). (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple oppressions (e.g., women of (...) color, women in the global South, working-class women, and/or queer and trans people), and thus, demonstrating the need to develop a new way of conceptualizing women. However, the question of what such a new conception would be remains unanswered. Specifically, if feminist theory today is to destabilize the old notion of “women” that relegates multiply oppressed women to the margin of feminism, and yet still needs to use some notion of “women” to critically analyze how the social structure of sexist oppression operates to subordinate women and to dismantle this oppression, how should the concept “women” be reformulated? In this dissertation, I argue that we need to understand women as a concept that is open to constant redefinition, which is socio-historically situated in the actualities of oppression. This is what I refer to as the “situated redefinition” model of women, which is formulated in more detail as follows: -/- The Situated Redefinition Model of Women (SR) – The concept “women” should be always open to being redefined in a way that it could better serve political goals grounded in the actual, daily lives of the marginalized. That is, “women” should be always open to new meanings and provisional definitions that the marginalized would find more useful to achieve political goals, which grow out of their concrete experiences in the current intersecting structures of oppression. -/- My central argument is that we need to understand the concept “women” according to the situated redefinition model, in order to employ this concept for doing intersectional feminism. To support this thesis, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. By engaging with the intersectionality literature, critical race feminisms, Asian/American feminisms, and recent critiques of intersectionality, the first part of the dissertation elucidates what exactly it means for feminism to be more “intersectional.” The second part develops the situated redefinition model and articulates why this model is needed to do intersectional feminism, drawing on the social/political philosophy literature on non-ideal theory, postmodern discussions of universality, and feminist discussions of identity politics. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on how we understand and use the concept women for feminist ends. My conceptual model offers a way for feminist scholar-activists to subvert the essentialist/exclusionary notion of “women” without abandoning altogether feminist-political deployments of the concept “women” for the purpose of ending sexist and intersecting oppressions. (shrink)