This symposium examines insurrectionist ethics, the brainchild of Leonard Harris. The position does not stem from one key source; it was born out of Harris’s philosophical interaction with various philosophers over an extended period, including thinkers as diverse as David Walker, Karl Marx, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alain Locke, and Angela Davis. The driving questions are: What counts as justified protest? Do slaves have a moral duty to insurrect? What character traits and modes to resistance are most conducive to liberation and (...) the amelioration of oppressive material conditions? Insurrectionist ethics is meant to address such questions. This symposium attempts to locate insurrectionist ethics in the work of representative practitioners. To this end, each of the contributors focuses on some historical figure in the American intellectual tradition with hopes of tracing, substantiating, questioning, clarifying, or extending Harris’s claims. (shrink)

An important feature of so-called rational decision making, at least in times of crisis, is arational: that is, our ability to decide manifests features of our characters or the values we hold rather than our reasoning abilities.1 Such a position stands in obvious opposition to the Western philosophical tradition. Consider, by comparison, the view of Immanuel Kant, who held that reason could, and perhaps sometimes ought to, operate independently of (and in opposition to) our sentiments. Contrary to Kant, William James (...) argues in "The Sentiment of Rationality" that arational mental states and phenomena—such as feelings, emotions, values, and attitudes—are indispensable to practical rationality (317). The attempt to .. (shrink)

In Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward A Reconstruction of Philosophy, Phillip Kitcher argues in Chapter 6, “Does ‘Race’ Have a Future” that developments in evolutionary biology may support a separation of our species into subcategories that could be regarded as races. The human species, he argues, could possibly be divided, using a similar methodology to that employed by evolutionary biologists, into relatively stable and isolated breeding populations that bear distinctive and salient clusters of significant genotypic and phenotypic traits. Hence, the eliminativist (...) claim that there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our use of the term ‘race’ is mistaken. There is, in short, a scientifically legitimate.. (shrink)

Alain Locke, the central promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, is placed in conversation with leading philosophers and cultural figures in the modern world, from Aristotle to Obama. For teachers and students of contemporary debates in pragmatism, diversity, and value theory, these conversations' define new-and controversial-terrain.

This paper begins with a presentation of some important aspects of the science behind global warming. Following that, I argue that attempts to address global warming and climate change as problems facing humanity ought not to center around economic understandings of the problem or it solutions. Moreover, I argue that pragmatism is especially vulnerable to this sort of misappropriation in seeking solutions to climate change, and that environmental pragmatists ought to make a conscious effort to avoid potential mischaracterizations of pragmatism (...) by providing a clearer sense of the boundaries that delimit its approach to climate change, or any other environmental crisis. (shrink)

This paper considers the increasingly common suggestion that a new form of warfare has emerged. It clarifies the notion of new wars and responds to an argument for the claim that in order to achieve military parity non-state actors must violate just war principles. I reject the claim that violation of just war principles is necessary and argue that we can make reasonable normative judgments about new wars in terms of just war theory. From there, I consider the possibility that (...) military parity can be achieved in a way that does not violate these principles and argue that it is permissible for relatively weak non-state actors to fight with fewer restrictions than conventional states. (shrink)