This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or entity to (...) its ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends. If there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire, no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the “subject”? If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration. For what would there be to rise up from and exercise his power over? And in? Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Jane Bennett has recently argued that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”, continuing that: “The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption”.11J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, ix. Henceforth VM. View all notes This insight is prefigured and re-affirmed by the work of Irigaray. Her sustained analysis of western thought and culture shows how its constitutive disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal is inextricably bound up with an equally deep-rooted disavowal of matter and corporeality. As the above passage from Speculum suggests,22L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133. Henceforth S. View all notes Irigaray seeks to expose woman's reduction to an object for a subject and a maternal-material resource for man's speculations; but in disentangling woman from her symbolic identification with the earth, she also seeks to release the earth from its identification with a passive and manipulable matter. Her work thus bears directly on the revaluation required to transform human beings' relations to materiality: both their own, and that of the earth they inhabit. At the centre of this revaluation is Irigaray's work to displace the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that Bennett also critiques, and to affirm instead a sexuate materiality that is both living and generative. Her consistent troubling of hylomorphism is as unsettling for the subject as her question: “But what if the ‘object’ started to speak?” This question is echoed in Bennett's concern with “the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks”.33 VM, 2, citing W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 157. View all notes As this passage indicates, Bennett's own project is more concerned with the agency of non-human materialities – including their role in the constitution of the human – than with specifically sexed bodies or a materiality inflected by sexual difference. It is these crucial differences in emphasis, I will suggest, that allow the work of these two thinkers to be brought together in productive dialogue. On the one hand, Bennett's approach affords a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matter; on the other, Irigaray's twinned ontology of sexual difference and maternal relation is better able to affirm the relational differences on which the “vitality” of a vital materiality depends. The paper begins by outlining several key elements of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference to show how it leads necessarily to a rethinking of matter. This rethinking is especially helpful for shifting away from the hylomorphism that has been a dominant strand in western thought, informing an understanding of the earth as a fundamentally inert and ever-ready resource. As I will show, the figures through which Irigaray re-articulates female specificity also allow her to refigure the earth as active matter that “turns upon herself ” in generative flux. In the second section, I will situate Irigaray's re-thinking of matter in relation to Bennett's “vital materiality”.44Bennett can be aligned with a number of thinkers who have come to be grouped under the heading “new materialisms”. See S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. View all notes An advantage of this concept is that it refuses the separation between humans and matter still implicit in concepts such as “the environment”. By attending to “our own constitution as vital materiality”, as well as the ways our “own” bodies are never “fully or exclusively human”, Bennett adjusts the status of human actants while re-evaluating non-human bodies “as actants rather than as objects”. As I will show, her approach provides a constructive critical perspective on Irigaray's work by drawing attention to the specifically non-sexuate nature of the elemental. Equally, however, Irigaray's insistence on sexuate difference problematises any appeal to a generic notion of “the human”. This is especially helpful, I will suggest, in relation to contemporary descriptions of climate change as “anthropogenic”. By homogenising human beings, such descriptions make it more difficult to address the ways in which current ecological problems are inseparable from global patterns of social, political and economic inequity. For both thinkers, challenging hylomorphism needs to be matched with a critique of the dominant modern model of the subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. And for both, this model is displaced and undone by the capacity of the human body to bear others within, in ways that engender and sustain human life. Yet as I will discuss in the final two sections, each thinker renders this “other within” in very different ways, with significant implications for the ethics and politics of a “vital materiality”. In the end it is Irigaray's rendering of a distinctively female capacity to bear an other within, explored via the generative relationality of a placental economy, that more fully escapes the individualism of the One and the Same. Together, Irigaray and Bennett show that to take seriously the ecological crises that currently confront us means overcoming the disavowal of both human beings' own fundamental materiality and our dependency on the sustaining materialities of the earth. In contrast, a dominant strand in contemporary responses to these crises is an environmental politics of “enlightened self-interest”55I borrow this phrase from H. Kopnina's critical discussion in “Forsaking Nature? Contesting ‘Biodiversity’ Through Competing Discourses of Sustainability”, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 7, no. 1 : 51–63. that precludes any serious re-evaluation of human beings' relations to matter and the earth. If human beings can be persuaded that current levels of environmental degradation are damaging to them, threatening perhaps their very survival, they are more likely to take decisive steps to alter their behaviour. Insofar as such approaches demand action only for the sake of human interests and ends, they are both anthropocentric and spring from the same instrumentalising rationality that has engendered the ecological crises we currently face. They may well be successful in prompting action. But by foregrounding the survival of “the human species” per se, such approaches foreclose discussion of whose interests are served if survival is all that is allowed to be at stake, and whose lives are thereby consigned to ongoing exploitation. Moreover, as I will argue below, the instrumental rationality that serves survival is at odds with an affirmation of life, as a becoming that depends on difference. With this in mind, I will problematise Bennett's proposed politics of “expanded self-interest”, while seeking to retain many of the insights her approach brings. To more fully displace the “rational” self-interest that has encouraged human exploitation of the earth, we might take up Bennett's “vital materiality” in ways informed by Irigaray's conception of generative difference and the relational space-time of the in-between. (shrink)

Abortion: The morality of abortion, by P. Ramsey. The problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect, by P. Foot. Whatever the consequences, by J. Bennett.--Sex: Sexual perversion, by T. Nagel. On sexual morality, by S. Ruddick.--Human rights and civil disobedience: Rights, human rights, and racial discrimination, by R. Wasserstrom. The justification of civil disobedience, by J. Rawls. Law and civil disobedience, by R. M. Dworkin.--Criminal punishment: The responsibility of criminals, by W. Kneale. Murder and the principles of punishment, (...) England and the United States, by H. L. A. Hart. Or else, by J. R. Lucas.--Violence and pacifism: What violence is, by N. Garver. Pacifism, a philosophical analysis, by J. Narveson.--War: War and murder, by G. E. M. Anscombe. On the morality of war, a preliminary inquiry, by R. Wasserstrom. Peace, by R. M. Hare.--Suicide and death: Suicide, by R. F. Holland. Death, by T. Nagel. Death, by M. Mothersill.--Bibliography (p. 386-390). (shrink)

This is the fourth chapter of my dissertation, Hedonic Value (Director: Jonathan Bennett), Syracuse University, August, 1998. It is an unpublished revision of my "Is It Good to Make Happy People?" Bioethics 12 (April 1998), pp. 93-110. I systematically lay out and assess all the main arguments on each side and conclude that, Yes, it is good to add individuals to the population who would have lives worth living.

How should we live? To answer that question, many people turn to the Bible. What they find is often inspiring, although it may set standards that are uncomfortably high: love your neighbor as yourself, treat others as you would like to be treated, and walk humbly with God. Inspiration, however, can be found in a great many books. To Kill a Mockingbird teaches the virtue of tolerance, and A Tale of Two Cities impresses us with the nobility of self-sacrifice. William (...) J. Bennett, a philosopher who served as U. S. Secretary of Education, edited a collection called The Book of Virtues that includes dozens of stories and poems designed to teach courage, selfreliance, and responsibility.i But the Bible, many people think, is different. It has an authority that other books lack. Therefore, they look to the Bible, not just for inspiration, but for answers to specific moral questions, such as questions about abortion and homosexuality. (shrink)

After considering and rejecting several arguments on both sides of the question, I conclude that it is good to make happy people (and not merely good to make people happy). This is the fourth chapter of my dissertation, Hedonic Value (Director: Jonathan Bennett), Syracuse University, August, 1998.

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students (...) and professional philosophers. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been tarred with the (...) brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

Recently much has been made of the grounding relation, and of the idea that it is intimately tied to fundamentality. If A grounds B, then A is more fundamental than B (though not vice versa ), and A is ungrounded if and only if it is fundamental full stop—absolutely fundamental. But here is a puzzle: is grounding itself absolutely fundamental?

Writing from a scientifically and philosophically informed perspective, the authors provide a critical overview of the conceptual difficulties encountered in many current neuroscientific and psychological theories.

Challenges, possibilities, and opportunitie for re-founding the tradition of philosophical personalism today.

The book "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" is an engaging criticism of cognitive neuroscience from the perspective of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of ordinary language. The authors' main claim is that assertions like "the brain sees" and "the left hemisphere thinks" are integral to cognitive neuroscience but that they are meaningless because they commit the mereological fallacy—ascribing to parts of humans, properties that make sense to predicate only of whole humans. The authors claim that this fallacy is at the heart of Cartesian (...) dualism, implying that current cognitive neuroscientists are Cartesian dualists. Against this claim, we argue that the fallacy cannot be committed within Cartesian dualism either, for this doctrine does not allow for an intelligible way of asserting that a soul is part of a human being. Also, the authors' Aristotelian essentialistic outlook is at odds with their Wittgensteinian stance, and we were unconvinced by their case against explanatory reductionism. Finally, although their Wittgensteinian stance is congenial with radical behaviorism, their separation between philosophy and science seems less so because it is based on a view of philosophy as a priori. The authors' emphasis on the a priori, however, does not necessarily commit them to rationalism if it is restricted to conceptual or analytical truths. (shrink)

A joke is amusing if and only if it’s fitting to be amused by it; an act is regrettable if and only if it’s fitting to regret it. Many philosophers accept these biconditionals and hold that analogous ones obtain between a wide range of additional evaluative properties and the fittingness of corresponding responses. Call these the _fit–value biconditionals_. The biconditionals give us a systematic way of recognizing the role of fit in our ethical practices; they also serve as the bedrock (...) of various metaethical projects, such as fitting-attitude analysis of value and the ‘fittingness first’ approach. Yet despite the importance of the biconditionals, there is very little discussion of their proper interpretation. This paper argues that any plausible interpretation of the fit_–_value biconditionals must disarm several kinds of apparent counterexample. For instance, that an achievement is pride-worthy doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to take pride in it because the achievement might not be mine or that of anyone close to me; that a joke is amusing doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to be amused by it for six straight months; and that a person is loveable doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to love him romantically because that person might be my sibling. We consider possible responses to such counterexamples and develop what we consider the most promising interpretation of the biconditionals. The upshot is that certain widespread assumptions about fit and its relation to value and reasons should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

This paper argues that hate differs from mere disliking in terms of its “depth,” which is understood via a notion of “othering,” whereby one rejects at least some aspect of the identity of the target of hate, identifying oneself as not being what they are. Fleshing this out reveals important differences between personal hate, which targets a particular individual, and impersonal hate, which targets groups of people. Moreover, impersonal hate requires focusing on the place hate has within particular sorts of (...) communities, enabling a further important distinction between “insider” and “outsider” hate in terms of whether the hater includes members of the targeted group within a particular community or rejects them as “beneath” membership in that community. (shrink)

What reasons can children have for coming to care about particular things so that they can develop into responsible adults? This question raises issues both about the status of such reasons as "internal" or "external" to the child’s subjective motivational set and about the role of adults in guiding children’s choices. In confronting this latter question, Tamar Schapiro argues that adults can adopt what amounts to a two-pronged strategy: of rewarding or punishing the child and of offering explanations and justifications. (...) Such a strategy, however, ignores the special role loving caregivers can play in a child’s life. By developing an account of such paternalistically loving relationships, I show how the caregiver’s conception of the child’s well-being can come to inform the child’s own sense of herself and so to provide her with essentially interpersonal reasons for caring. Indeed, such reasons can be both normatively and motivationally binding on the child even though she may not yet be in a position to understand them. That such reasons are essentially interpersonal seems to make otiose whether they are "internal" or "external," thereby rendering that distinction less important than we might have thought. (shrink)

Children who are introduced to God, through attending church or having loved ones who speak often about God, often have a lot of questions, including this ever-popular one: What is God like? The late Rachel Held Evans loved the Bible and loved showing God's love through the words and pictures found in that ancient text. Through these pictures from the Bible, children see that God is like a shepherd, God is like a star, God is like a gardener, God (...) is like the wind, and more. God is a comforter and support. (shrink)

Quid est veritas? -- What is science? how we understand the physical world -- What a piece of work is man: the rise of the social sciences -- Educational science and pseudo science -- Multiple intelligences: if everyone's smart, no one is -- My NLP and brain gym hell -- Group work: failing better, together -- I'm with stupid: emotional intelligence -- Buck Rogers and the 21st century curriculum -- Techno, techno, techno, techno: digital natives in flipped classrooms -- The (...) holy trinity of the three-part lesson -- There are no such things as learning styles -- Game over: the gamification of education -- Learning to learn to learn to learn -- The hard smell: smell/ dance/ box/sing yourself smarter/ happier/ healthier -- Thinking hats on! -- School uniform armageddon -- What everyone in education should do next. (shrink)

Anthology of readings in moral philosophy.

This article draws on the philosophical work on dialogic rationality offered by Charles Taylor as well as qualitative studies of dialogues between politically opposed college students to argue that these conversations succeed as tools of democracy precisely because they fail as interventions. That is, the democratic strength of such dialogue is the way in which it is unreliable as a means of producing particular outcomes. Students whose political views eventually shifted partly in response to dialogue understood this not as a (...) process of changing their commitments, but rather of finding a better expression for the commitments they already held. But the interviews show, too, just how rare it is for such shifts to occur at all, at least for these students in a period of political polarization and mutual distrust. The interviews suggest as well that the appeal to already shared ground is not the whole story of what prompts people to change their minds in these kinds of conversations. Rather the asking of direct but respectful questions was a crucial ingredient. Finally, dialogue did not independently cause the most profound changes in political views. Instead, it was the direction of students' lives that over time shifted their outlook. Their dialogue experience then gained meaning in retrospect, as the beginning of a process of self-questioning that was brought to fruition only later, as a first time that they had heard alternative possibilities for how value commitments can be expressed through politics. (shrink)

Global supply chains often distribute value inequitably among the Global North and South. This perpetuates poverty and contributes to indecent work in raw material-producing countries, thus creating challenges to sustainable development. For decades, corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable business model innovations have aimed to distribute value more equitably across global value chains, for instance via fair trade, alternative trade, and direct trade. This article examines a novel and hitherto understudied innovation for equitable value distribution in global supply chains: (...) “value chain profit sharing.” We draw on interview and archival data from two cases of social entrepreneurs working in the coffee sector to develop a generalized model. One of the model's key features is that the entrepreneur pays suppliers in multiple installments that reflect market conditions (as opposed to a single lump sum based on prediction). We show how this can increase value creation, appropriation, and equitable distribution. Although our research suggests that this model may be highly contingent on leaders' skills, resources, sense of place, and accountability to suppliers, we find no evidence that its applications are limited to specific countries or sectors. Our research further extends extant theory by showing how “value chain profit sharing” may relieve some of the tensions often associated with sustainable business models, including distributing value to suppliers while maintaining financial solvency; creating value while pursuing a social mission; providing benefits to suppliers without curtailing their market opportunities; responding to market conditions while maintaining commitments to suppliers; and scaling without diluting benefits. It thereby contributes to the literatures on sustainable business model innovations, equitable value distribution in global supply chains, novel application of revenue-sharing contracts, and innovative methods of profit sharing. It furthermore provides actionable guidance for social entrepreneurs, corporate social responsibility practitioners, and supplier cooperatives aiming to achieve more equitable value distribution and sustainable supply chains. (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether traditional behaviors of animals, like traditions of humans, are transmitted by imitation learning. Review of the literature on problem solving by captive primates, and detailed consideration of two widely cited instances of purported learning by imitation and of culture in free-living primates (sweet-potato washing by Japanese macaques and termite fishing by chimpanzees), suggests that nonhuman primates do not learn to solve problems by imitation. It may, therefore, be misleading to treat animal traditions and human (...) culture as homologous (rather than analogous) and to refer to animal traditions as cultural. (shrink)

In Talking about, Unnsteinsson defends an intentionalist theory of reference by arguing that confused referential intentions degrade reference. Central to this project is a “belief model” of both identity confusion and unconfused thought. By appealing to a well‐known argument from Campbell, I argue that this belief model falls short, because it fails to explain the inferential behavior it promises to explain. Campbell's argument has been central in the contemporary literature on Frege's puzzle, but Unnsteinsson's account of confusion provides an opportunity (...) for more clarity about how the argument is best interpreted, and what it shows. (shrink)

Lighten up about mathematics! Have fun. If you read this book, you will have to endure bad math puns and jokes and out-of-date pop culture references. You'll learn some really cool mathematics to boot. In the process, you will immerse yourself in living, thinking, and breathing logical reasoning. We like to call this proofs, which to some is a bogey word, but to us it is a boogie word. You will learn how to solve problems, real and imagined. After all, (...) math is a game where, although the rules are pretty much set, we are left to our imaginations to create. Think of this book as blueprints, but you are the architect of what structures you want to build. Make sure you lay a good foundation, for otherwise your buildings might fall down. To help you through this, we guide you to think and plan carefully. Our playground consists of basic math, with a loving emphasis on number theory. We will encounter the known and the unknown. Ancient and modern inquirers left us with elementary-sounding mathematical puzzles that are unsolved to this day. You will learn induction, logic, set theory, arithmetic, and algebra, and you may one day solve one of these puzzles. (shrink)

The postwar welfare state provides social insurance against economic, health, and related risks in an uncertain world. Because everyone can envision themselves to be among the unfortunate, social insurance fuses self-interest and solidarism in a normative principle Friedman (2020) calls probabilistic justice. But there is a competing principle of status defense, where the aim is to erect boundaries between socioeconomic strata and discourage cross-class mobility. We argue that this principle dominates when inequality is high and uncertainty low. The current moment (...) is one of high inequality and high uncertainty, which results in intense status anxiety, yet does not rule out solidaristic solutions. Our contributions are to diagnose the causes of our current malaise, and to theorize the normative bases for the political choice facing contemporary western democracies. (shrink)

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires and (...) evaluative judgements and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons. (shrink)

Priest, poet and broadcaster Rachel Mann believes the world is charged with a divine spark. She explains how in our encounters with what she terms 'the spectres of God', one can become at peace with limitation, precariousness, lack of certainty, and one's fragility and fractures - and at the same time find in divine fragility the hope of the world. Drawing on her own experiences, in three short chapters (on the body, on love, and on time) Mann explores how (...) God invites us, repeatedly, to live in a rich three-dimensional mystery that subverts the depressing flat-earth of modern life. (shrink)

What is this thing called literature? What is the point of studying literature? How do I study literature? Relating literature to timeless topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the crazy, this beautifully written book establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Bennett and Royle delicately weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and what sort of questions and (...) ideas they provoke.The book's three parts reflect the key components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. Part One comprises short chapters on reading a poem, reading a novel, reading a story, and reading a play. Part Two considers what thinking is, especially in relation to critical thinking and thinking about literature. Part three includes practical chapters on writing an essay, creative writing, and writing fiction. The authors use helpful, familiar examples throughout and offer brief reflections on questions such as 'What is literature?', on 'English' as a war zone, on crisis management and literary criticism, on dictionaries and on what the authors call creative reading. Bennett and Royle's lucid and friendly style engages and encourages personal experience of this thing called literature. (shrink)

Scholars have critiqued mainstream economic approaches to environmental valuation for decades. These critiques have intensified with the increased prominence of environmental valuation in decision-making. This paper has three goals. First, we summarise prominent critiques of monetary valuation, drawing mostly on the work of Clive Spash, who worked extensively on cost–benefit analysis early in his career and then became one of monetary valuation's most thorough and ardent critics. Second, we, as a group of scholars who study relational values, describe how relational (...) values research engages with and addresses many of the critiques of monetary valuation. Third, we offer suggestions for relational values research that continues and deepens its ability to respond to critiques of monetary valuation and contributes to transformative change towards sustainability. (shrink)