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Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have focused on essentialism and generic generalizations, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for ameliorative projects. Ameliorated nouns (and their conceptual correlates) can continue to underpin essentializing inferences. Given the way language and cognition function, ameliorative projects can fail to meet core anti-essentialist social and political ends by failing to consider the import of vehicles of representation. Yet, I argue, representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather, would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the propensities for our representations to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice.

Poetry’s importance to the Daoist tradition goes beyond presenting philosophical content in verse. Authors of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi make their claims about philosophy of language, not with proofs, but through demonstrations of open-endedness and invitations to consider what meanings are at stake. I examine the Daoists’ use of poetic techniques such as metaphorical language, rhetorical shifts, and allusion to show that the features of poetry which cause many Western philosophers (beginning with Plato) concern are the very features that Daoist authors depend upon. Through further close reading of other philosophical poems, including examples from British and contemporary American poets, I argue that poetry avails itself of a broader range of resources to engage in philosophical exploration.

Recent work in the epistemology of partisan polarization has wrestled with a growing understanding that appealing to (what are postulated to be) shared objective facts is not sufficient to lead to consensus. Disagreement does not always reflect how parties are interpreting shared facts differently, but rather may reach down to divergences over what “facts” even are. This talk engages constructively with theories of world creation emerging from the Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition to develop an enacted, embodied account of human realities that neither rejects facts altogether, nor adheres to the illusion that there is a single, objective reality that is the same for all. The Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition claims that the way that humans conceptualize their experience always involves excluding large swaths of potentially relevant information, and these conceptualizations form the contours of our worlds. Since the worlds we experience are just particular carvings of a reality that could be spliced in an infinite number of ways, our resulting realities may only partially overlap. Thinking alongside these traditions about reality as a question of partially overlapping worlds that are continuously created by the interplay of ourselves, others, and our environments opens up space for understanding the partiality of any position, as well as the constitutive role that exclusion plays in creating worlds.

https://zoom.us/j/91247236556 

The thesis of Plato’s Republic is that justice is always good – indeed, that it is always good for the just person and not just good from some impersonal point of view. In this talk I venture an account of why Socrates is concerned to establish exactly this point. I argue that intellectualism about virtue – the view that virtue, and justice in particular, is or crucially involves a kind of knowledge – makes it particularly urgent to establish that justice is always good; denial of that thesis would threaten the coherence of intellectualism. I then show how Socrates’ main line of argument neutralizes this threat. Finally, I speculate on a resultant puzzle: If intellectualism motivates both the thesis and the main argumentative structure of the Republic, how are we to square that with the famous anti-intellectualism of Book 4?