Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was one of the most influential and innovative political theorists of her generation who had a significant impact on a wide range of topics such as democratic theory, feminist theory, and justice. She bridged many longstanding divides among political theorists, engaging in Continental and critical theory, but also insisting on the importance of normative argument: her corpus stands as a testament to the fruitfulness of engaging in both abstract theory and the 'real world' of everyday (...) politics. This volume spans the several decades of her work, illustrating her intellectual development over time through three major areas of innovation: Gender: Maintaining that gender is both conceptually and politically meaningful, Young theorized gender in terms of structures that, in combination, position different people we call "women" in different ways, such that some women have some structures in common, without all women sharing all gendered structures in common. Justice: Young's early writings on a critical theory of justice evolved in her later and posthumously published works where she developed an account of justice that brought together her theorization of structure with her concern to respond to contemporary claims of injustice. The Politics of Difference: Young rejected universal and abstract theories of justice and maintained that justice instead required attending to the experiences of people marked by difference. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch was one of the great philosophers and novelists of the twentieth century and The Sovereignty of Good is her most important and enduring philosophical work. She argues that philosophy has focused, mistakenly, on what it is right to do rather than good to be and that only by restoring the notion of ‘vision’ to moral thinking can this distortion be corrected. This brilliant work shows why Iris Murdoch remains essential reading: a vivid and uncompromising style, a (...) commitment to forceful argument, and a courage to go against the grain. With a foreword by Mary Midgley. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated, often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless.

The exchange between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on the status of halakha is a well known, but also frustrating fixture in scholarship. For rather than responding to Rosenzweig’s critique, Buber seems to retreat in silence, claiming to be “unable to speak” about his position on Jewish Law. Scholars have generally tried to explain Buber’s failure to respond on philosophical and biographical grounds. What I propose, by contrast, is to revisit the question of Buber’s silence and secrecy from a hermeneutical (...) standpoint, arguing that Buber engaged in a deliberate strategy of concealment that constituted its own form of response. The hermeneutics of silence discloses a call for religious renewal that follows a state of Dialogvergessenheit, but which cannot be made audible. Neither dialogue nor its remembrance can be commanded. While Buber struggles with his Nichtredenkönnen, he also stands in a tradition of secretive hermeneutics – the Jewish hermeneutics of sod. (shrink)

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, (...) clothing, and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

Muḥammad Mahdī ibn Abī Z̲arr Narāqī, -1794 or 1795. Jāmiʻ al-saʻādāt - Criticism and interpretation; Islamic ethics.

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice.

Iris Murdoch was one of the great philosophers and novelists of the twentieth century and The Sovereignty of Good is her most important and enduring philosophical work. She argues that philosophy has focused, mistakenly, on what it is right to do rather than good to be and that only by restoring the notion of ‘vision’ to moral thinking can this distortion be corrected. This brilliant work shows why Iris Murdoch remains essential reading: a vivid and uncompromising style, a (...) commitment to forceful argument, and a courage to go against the grain. With a foreword by Mary Midgley. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

In a class of quantum gravity approaches it is indicated that our observable world emerges out of a fundamental structure that appears highly resistant to any clear spatial or temporal interpretation. In this work we are examining an analogue quantum system that appears to simulate such an unintuitive structure: the emergence of the so called topological phase of matter depicted by the Chern–Simons gauge theory. By investigating the proposed analogy from the lens of category theory, we offer a clear interpretation (...) of the way in which space and time act at the fundamental level. (shrink)

Dooley provides background information for each of the interviews, along with a thorough index.

Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy has long influenced contemporary ethics, yet it has not, in general, received the kind of sustained critical attention that it deserves. "Existentialists and Mystics" and "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" provide new access to most of Murdoch's philosophical writings and make possible a deeper appreciation of her contribution to current thought. After assessing the recent critical reception of Murdoch's thought, this review places her moral philosophy in the context of contemporary trends in ethics by (...) tracing her influence on the work of Charles Taylor, highlights the distinctive features of her moral philosophy, and suggests future directions for Murdochian ethics. (shrink)

This latest work from one of the world's leading political philosophers will appeal to audiences from a variety of fields, including philosophy, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and communications studies.

The essays in this special issue shed new light on the transnational movement and exchange of researchers, data, theories, and scientific objects in the anthropological and genetic study of human populations in the twentieth century. Historians have long stressed how the study of race and human populations in this period served to create a national identity for emerging nation states. More recently, historical narratives of anthropology and human genetics have emphasized the global scale of research networks in these sciences. This (...) issue explores the specific routes, crossings, and interactions between national and international contexts prompted by the study of races and populations. The essays reveal not only how... (shrink)

The idea of perfection.--On God and Good.--The sovereignty of good over other concepts.

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to (...) take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. (shrink)

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity (...) that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education. (shrink)

With regard to organ donation, Germany is an ‘opt-in’ country, which requires explicit consent from donors. The relatives are either asked to decide on behalf of the donors’ preferences, if these are unknown or if the potential donor has explicitly transferred the decision to them. At the core of this policy lies the sociocultural and moral premise of a rational, autonomous individual, whose rights require legal protection in order to guarantee a voluntary decision. In concrete transplantation practices, the family plays (...) an even more important role. Potential donors and their families decide while being embedded in relations, a point which does still not gain full recognition. This particular discrepancy between policy and practice creates conflicts, which remain taboos of academic inquiry and public discourse. Our analysis shows a plurality of the family’s role in the transplantation process, which reveals an inner tension of the organ donation system. This tension provokes epistemic opacity on the one hand and different collective strategies as responses to discursive exclusion on the other. In future deliberations about organ donation, it is important to create spaces for open discussion, but also practices of communicative engagement, which take care of the needs and emotions attached to taboos. (shrink)

Cognitive science has evolved since early disputes between radical empiricism and radical nativism. The authors are reacting to the revival of radical empiricism spurred by recent successes in deep neural network (NN) models. We agree that language-like mental representations (language-of-thoughts [LoTs]) are part of the best game in town, but they cannot be understood independent of the other players.

When it comes to the body, the professional pedagogical field shows a paradoxical attitude: With regard to sense-oriented school subjects, educational policies tend to underline a close relatedness of body and mind. However, where learning is primarily connected with mental activities and intellectual engagement, the body is rarely assigned an integral role. Discussing the grounding ideologies of this paradox, I will consult phenomenological and enactivist perspectives in order to develop an approach to embodied learning which takes into account both sense-oriented (...) as well as intellectual domains. I will argue that considering the interdependence of body and mind including their situatedness does not only benefit the cultivation of the body and the senses, but also opens up further perspectives for intellectual engagement. (shrink)

The acclaimed author of The Good Apprentice draws on the entire history of philosophy--and particularly on Plato and Kant--to formulate her own model of morality and demonstrate how thoroughly it is bound up with our daily lives. "An utterly absorbing book".--The Wall Street Journal.

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, (...) that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. (shrink)

The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)

A large campaign has sought to destigmatize psychiatric disorders by disseminating the view that they are in fact brain disorders. But when psychiatric disorders are associated with neurobiological correlates, laypeople's attitudes toward patients are harsher, and the prognoses seem poorer. Here, we ask whether these misconceptions could result from the essentialist presumption that brain disorders are innate. To this end, we invited laypeople to reason about psychiatric disorders that are diagnosed by either a brain or a behavioral test that were (...) strictly matched for their informative value. Participants viewed disorders as more likely to be innate and immutable when the diagnosis was supported by a brain test as compared to a behavioral test. These results show for the first time that people spontaneously essentialize psychiatric conditions that are linked to the brain, even when the brain probe offers no additional diagnostic or genetic information. This bias suggests that people consider the biological essence of living things as materially embodied. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that leaders’ narcissistic rivalry is positively associated with abusive supervision. However, it remains unclear when and how leaders high in narcissistic rivalry show abusive supervision. Building on trait activation theory and the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (NARC), we assumed that leaders high in narcissistic rivalry particularly show abusive supervision in reaction to follower workplace deviance due to their tendency to devaluate others. We argued that leaders’ injury initiation motives explain why leaders high in narcissistic rivalry (...) react with abusive supervision when experiencing organization-directed or supervisor-directed deviance. However, this should not be the case for coworker-directed deviance, as leaders high in narcissistic rivalry are less likely to find such behavior violates their internal norms. We conducted two studies. In the first study, we provided participants with experimental vignettes of follower workplace deviance. In the second study, we used a mixed-methods approach and investigated leaders’ autobiographical recollections of follower workplace deviance. We found a positive direct effect of leaders’ narcissistic rivalry across both studies. Leaders high in narcissistic rivalry showed abusive supervision (intentions) in response to organization-directed deviance (Studies 1 and 2) or supervisor-directed deviance (Study 1), but not in response to coworker-directed deviance (Studies 1 and 2). Leaders’ injury initiation motives could in part explain this effect. We discuss findings in light of the NARC and devaluation of others and derive implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

I feel there are demons around.' Everyone is thinking about Julius King. For comfortable, long-married Hilda and Rupert, he is a mystery. For Morgan, Hilda's tormented sister, he is an obsession. For Morgan's abandoned husband, Tallis, he is the source of ruin. For Simon and Axel, deeply in love, he stirs up jealousy and unease. What is Julius thinking about? He's thinking about Hilda, Rupert, Morgan, Tallis, Simon and Axel, and they will not all survive his malevolent attention. WITH AN (...) INTRODUCTION BY GARTH GREENWELL VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels. (shrink)

The decline of religion and ever increasing influence of science pose acute ethical issues for us all. Can we reject the literal truth of the Gospels yet still retain a Christian morality? Can we defend any 'moral values' against the constant encroachments of technology? Indeed, are we in danger of losing most of the qualities which make us truly human? Here, drawing on a novelist's insight into art, literature and abnormal psychology, Iris Murdoch conducts an ongoing debate with major (...) writers, thinkers and theologians—from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Shakespeare to Sartre, Plato to Derrida—to provide fresh and compelling answers to these crucial questions. (shrink)

Horace’s Carmen 3.27 has been subject to various interpretations. Being at first glance a sympathetically written propempticon to Galatea, the ode on closer inspection shows many negative undertones: The omens in the first stanzas are ambiguous, the sea will be stormy (literally and metaphorically), and even in the illustrating myth of Europa negative aspects predominate, above all her desperation, which two delusive deities, Jupiter the adulterer and a perfidum ridens Venus, do not really help to end. Europa’s beguilement by Jupiter (...) serves as a warning to the beloved Galatea: The rival whom she is about to follow over the sea might be as philandering as the adulterous god. (shrink)

A collection of the author's most influential essays and short works includes her critique of existentialism, her two dialogues on art and religion, key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, the concept of love, and more.

In this work we present an epistemic analysis of time phenomenon using the mathematical machinery of information theory and modular theory. By adopting limited commitment to the ontology of time evolution, and instead by mainly relying on the information that is in principle accessible to the observer, we find that the most primary aspect of the temporal experience, the perceived distinctiveness across the states of the world, emerges as a purely epistemic function. By analyzing the mathematical properties of this epistemic (...) function, we interpret it to be in principle insensitive to any ontic state of the world, which leads to the conclusion that the observer is subject to temporal experience irrespective of whether the underlying state of the world is dynamical or invariant. On the ground of the presented analysis, we also provide a solution to the conceptual challenge of non-equilibrium phenomena that faces the thermal time hypothesis. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Structural Inequality Approach Societal Culture Approach Who's Who in the Politics of Difference? The Meaning of Culture Worries about the Ascendancy of the Societal Culture Model Notes.