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This chapter contains section titled: The Value Problem Sosa's Solution Epistemically Valuable False Beliefs Organic Unities Gettier.

This is a unique, groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays by leading women in philosophy. It provides a glimpse at the experiences of the generation that witnessed, and helped create, the remarkable advances now evident for women in the field.

In this paper I make a preliminary analysis of Western (or global North) discourses on sexual violence, focusing on the important concepts of “consent” and “victim.” The concept of “consent” is widely used to determine whether sexual violence has occurred, and it is the focal point of debates over the legitimacy of statutory offenses and over the way we characterize sex work done under conditions involving economic desperation. The concept of “victim” is shunned by many feminists and nonfeminists alike for (...) its apparent eclipse of agency. Putting these concepts into a global framework sheds light on their limitations. Bringing in the debate over the concept “honor crime” reveals contrasting assumptions about the nature of sexual violence. The comparative analysis used in this paper shows how we can avoid universalizing from specific frameworks, but also how we can learn from the discourses elsewhere toward developing an account of commonalities across contexts. Ultimately I argue that in applications to sexual violence, “consent” has intrinsic limitations, “victim” has context-based dangers, and “honor crime” makes both correct as well as incorrect assumptions. (shrink)

Philosophers and bioethicists are typically sceptical about invocations of dignity in ethical debates. Many believe that dignity is essentially devoid of meaning: either a mere rhetorical gesture used in the absence of good argument or a faddish term for existing values like autonomy and respect. On the other hand, the patient experience of dignity is a substantial area of research in healthcare fields like nursing and palliative care. In this paper, it is argued that philosophers have much to learn from (...) the concrete patient experiences described in healthcare literature. Dignity is conferred on people when they are treated as having equal status, something the sick and frail are often denied in healthcare settings. The importance of equal status as a unique value has been forcefully argued and widely recognised in political philosophy in the last 15 years. This paper brings medical ethics up to date with philosophical discussion about the value of equal status by developing an equal status conception of dignity. (shrink)

In this response to the comments on my book, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation, I offer a futher elaboration of the crucial concept of sexual subjectivity put forward as a way to approach the normative evaluation of sexual practices. This concept makes possible a healthy pluralism without retreating to a facile libertarian view that would render consent sufficient to determine morally unproblematic sex. The concept of sexual subjectivity sanctions experimentation in our sexual lives and the question (...) arises as to whether this opens the door to anything. Yet the concept of experimentation also presupposes that some experiments fail and that all require assessment. I argue that assessment is best done in intra-group discussions where people share broad experiences and aims, but it is also possible to communicate concerns and ideas across groups. I then discuss my use of Foucault to elaborate the specific challenges that are encountered when one tries to speak about rape and sexual violations, and also the ways we can use his work to develop more effectively resistant speaking practices. (shrink)

This essay examines the ethics of boycotting as a social response to injustice or wrongdoing. The boycotts in question are collective actions in which private citizens withdraw from or avoid consumer or cultural interaction with parties perceived to be responsible for some transgression. Whether a particular boycott is justified depends, not only on the reasonableness of the underlying moral critique, but also on what the boycotters are doing in boycotting. The essay considers four possible interpretations of the kind of act (...) in which boycotting consists: the avoidance of complicity, protest speech, social punishment, or social coercion. Each interpretation provides a plausible account of at least some cases of boycotting, yet each raises distinct challenges to justifying boycotting activities. (shrink)

In her article, Alcoff argues for the need to examine the reality of race philosophically. According to Alcoff, liberal notions of universality as well as the postmodern critique of essentialism make it difficult to address race and its ongoing significance in social life. By engaging with authors like Charles W. Mills and Paul Gilroy, Alcoff aims to show that it is possible to develop an account of race as social and historical reality without essentializing the category of race.

Every day, in many situations, we use expressions which seem only vaguely to provide us with information. The weather forecaster tells us that "some showers are likely in Northern regions during the night", a statement which is vague with respect to number of showers, location, and time. Yet such messages are informative, and often it is not possible for the producer of the message to be more precise. A tutor tells his students that "only a few students fail their exams (...) outright". This does not give a precise incidence. Yet it might be equally misleading to do so. For example, to say that 12% failed outright last year says nothing about other years, while to say an average of 8% over the last five years says nothing about variability. We argue that a precise, numerical statement can be sometimes more misleading in reality than a vague statement. Many researchers in psychology have attempted to capture the meaning of quantities by relating them to scales of quantity. The book explores this idea in detail and shows with original studies how these expressions also serve to control attention and to convey information about the expectations held by those involved in the communication. The book works towards a psychological theory of the meaning of quantifiers and similarly vague terms. New links are drawn between formal theories of quantification and psychological experimentation. (shrink)

Social Postmodernism offers a transformative political vision and addresses the live questions in identity politics. The postmodern focus on race, sexuality and gender is sharpened by integrating the micro-social concerns of the social movements associated with these issues and macro-institutional and cultural analysis. Social Postmodernism brings together leading theorists to explore further the implications for the discourses of feminism, post-Marxian cultural studies, African-American, Gay, Latino/a and postcolonial studies.

This paper provides a revisionist account of the authority and power of the criminal mugshot. Dominant theories in the field have tended to focus on the ways in which mugshots have been used as a way of disciplining criminal bodies and rendering them docile. It is argued here that additional emphasis could usefully be placed on stories of resistance in which the monological production site of the prison or police station transforms into a dialogical site, in which the objects of (...) police photography can acquire agency. These issues are explored with particular reference to a set of photographs of English suffragettes acquired by the police for surveillance purposes. The suffragette’s refusal to comply with requests to have their photographs taken is used as a case study through which to examine the ways in which conventions about the form of the mugshot can be subverted, ideas about the types of people who were the object/subject of mugshots disrupted and the assumption of documentary neutrality undermined. (shrink)

Examines the women's movement, discusses feminist theories, and considers the writings of Locke and Marx concerning the separation of family and state.

ABSTRACT Serene Khader’s effort to develop a decolonized approach to transnational feminism takes a helpfully nonideal approach. Much of decolonial theory has criticized universalism in order to espouse pluralism. Khader attempts to develop a form of minimalist universalism compatible with a significant dose of pluralism in regard to how we understand liberation from gender-based forms of oppression, and she effectively shows how the nonideal, meliorative approach can do this. I address three issues here: (1) the serious challenge her universalist account (...) poses to critical theory and some other trends in continental philosophy; (2) the persuasive analysis of, approach to, and critique that she makes of ‘gender role eliminativism’ and (3) the epistemic and dialogic questions left remaining in her defense of feminist universalism, in relation to who can theoretically formulate the universal. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy has been concerned with race and racism since its inception for both historical and conceptual reasons. Historically, the struggle against sexism consistently followed in the footsteps of the struggle against slavery and racism, both in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth centuries. Women who resisted slavery and racism began to rethink common beliefs about women's role, and took inspiration from the abolitionist and civil rights struggles. Nineteenth‐century transcendentalist Margaret Fuller Ossoli made a conceptual analogy between slavery as (...) an unfair restriction on human freedom and the social and economic restrictions on white women. Simone de Beauvoir argued that slaves and white women had been infantilized in similar ways. Many early feminist accounts of sexism borrowed from analyses of slavery and racism, how these were justified through attributions of inferiority and dependence, and how these affected the subjectivity of the oppressed. (shrink)

I argue here that first person speech on sexual violence remains an important dimension of the movement for social change in regard to sexual violence, and that the public speech of survivors faces at least three groups of obstacles: 1) the problem of epistemic injustice, that is, injustice in the sphere of knowledge 2) the problem of language and power, and 3) the problem of dominant discourses. I explain and develop these points and end with a final argument concerning the (...) critical importance of speaking publicly on these areas of human experience. (shrink)

John Locke famously sets the arts of rhetoric at odds with the pursuit of knowledge. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Grassi, this article shows that Locke’s epistemological and political arguments are parasitic on the very tropes and figures he would exclude in any serious discourse. Accordingly, Locke’s attack on the divine right of kings and his famous argument for the social contract is read as exhibiting a rhetorical structure. This structure is crucial to Locke’s critique of heteronomy and his (...) attempt to facilitate the identification of oneself as a free subject. (shrink)

The politics of ethnic names, such as ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’, raises legitimate issues for three reasons: because non-political considerations of descriptive adequacy are insufficient to determine absolutely the question of names; political considerations may be germane to an ethnic name’s descriptive adequacy; and naming opens up the political question of a chosen furture, to which we are accountable. The history of colonial and neo-colonial conditions structuring the relations of the North, Central and South Americas is both critical in understanding the (...) political condition of Latinos in the USA and relevant in current colonial relations. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the devaluation of the work of public intellectuals within the academic community. The principal reason given for this devaluation is that the work of the public intellectual does not have intellectual integrity as independent thought and original scholarship. I develop three models of public intellectual work: the permanent–critic model, the popularizer model, and the public–theorist model. I then consider each model in relation to the concern with intellectual integrity and conclude that both independent thought and (...) original scholarship are possible within work that is engaged with nonacademic publics. (shrink)