While the COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted and endangered the health and welfare of people all over the world, there is one social group that has faced special discrimination in the aftermath of this world-wide catastrophe: people with disabilities. Within the United States, various response plans in Washington, Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee place the lives of people with disabilities in danger by rationing the care available.[1] Similarly, medical professionals in Europe and Asia have had to make difficult decisions when choosing whom to help when medical resources are so scarce.[2] Furthermore, children with special needs, such as those for autism or Down’s Syndrome, have had their services limited or curtailed within the United States.[3] Finally, workers with health conditions have been laid off or fired because their employers did not desire or were unable to pay for their needed health leaves.[4] The aim of this paper is to address these injustices by considering Iris Marion Young’s five faces of oppression – exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence - affecting people with disabilities in our post-pandemic world.[5] I argue further that people with disabilities have been silenced by a fearful public concerning these matters and as a result, have suffered an epistemic injustice. I conclude by providing a new model for embodiment as a better guide for inclusion, care and differentiated solidarity.
We will consider the duties of the affluent to those who are most disadvantaged.
Since the revival of virtue ethics in the mid-20th century, there has been increasing interest in virtue theories within epistemology, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and beyond. Moving beyond virtue ethics’ focus on moral virtues, this aretaic turn in philosophy has led to the proliferation of putatively distinct kinds of virtues. However, relatively little has been said about how to understand the relationship between these kinds of virtues within contemporary virtue theories. I articulate a number of different potential relationships between moral and intellectual virtues, before turning to argue that a unified account of moral and intellectual virtues follows from an understanding of virtues as excellent, reliably motivated character traits. In addition to reintegrating virtue scholarship across domains, this proposed unity of virtues has significant implications within the context of virtue education.
The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣadteaches that consciousness has four forms: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and turīya(the fourth). Miri Albahari and Ramakrishna Puligandla maintain that mystics in turīyaexperience their identity with ultimate absolute reality. They further claim that this mystical experience corroborates the ontology of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, according to which ultimate reality is impersonal, only ultimate reality is real, and conventional reality is nonreal. A. G. Javadekar also accepts the Advaita ontology, but he denies that mystical experience corroborates it. However, some mystics report ultimate reality either as personal or as simultaneously impersonal and personal. Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda describe another kind of mystical experience of ultimate reality which paraconsistently incorporates and encompasses all other kinds of mystical experiences. This article designates pañcama(the fifth) as the form of consciousness that encompasses turīya.
Some feelings seem to color everything. While an emotion like fear is typically “intentional” or directed, being a fear of something, feelings like anxiety or dread are characterized by the vagueness of their object and by the way they pervade consciousness, potentially making any object appear as a threat. Matthew Ratcliffe defines these pervasive feelings as “existential feelings,” senses of possibility like “feeling alive” or “feeling deadened,” and argues that these feelings are “pre-intentional,” conditions of the possibility of the scope and valence of intentional states like beliefs or desires. Change in existential feelings, or “existential change,” may thus have sweeping effects upon a subject’s mental states. The category of the pre-intentional seems promising in accounting for experiences of depression. However, there remains a question of “bi-directionality”: how or if intentional states might affect the pre-intentional, such that changes in, say, beliefs might affect the possibility of existential change. I propose the introduction of a feeling-disposition distinction: existential feelings are not pre-intentional structures but ways of becoming aware of the “existential dispositions” that are pre-intentional structures. I then argue that existential dispositions, and the pre-intentional generally, are a category of states that are introspectively opaque and so ambiguous between being an intentional state, like a “quasibelief,” or non-intentional state, like a reflex. I will show that this redefinition clarifies how beliefs about what one’s experiences of depression signify may induce existential change that alleviates the suffering of these experiences.
There is a $50 registration fee for the conference, payable online.
Papers in any philosophical area are welcome. The Northwest Philosophy Conference welcomes submissions from women and members of minority groups.
I address how sentience might arise using a comparative analysis of the nondual philosophy of the 11th century Hindu philosopher Abhinavagupta in relation to a contemporary, currently popular neuroscientific theory addressing the relation between the mind and the body, Integrated Information Theory (IIT 3.0). How it is that some things and entities are classified as sentient, while others are not? While much of Indian philosophy engages with the concept of consciousness, often writ in large and abstract terms, as cit or samvit, I suggest that Abhinavagupta’s articulation of consciousness as vimarśa may be better suited as a concept for determining the status of sentience. This analysis of Abhinavagupta’s panentheism, particularly with the concept of vimarśa, brings to the forefront a crucial and often somewhat overlooked premise underlying IIT 3.0’s ontological framework: the implicit and requisite assumption of subjectivity within materiality.
As an undergraduate student at a liberal arts college, there are few opportunities to develop relationships with graduate students and professors outside one’s home institution. This summer, I was lucky to attend the Caribbean Philosophy Association Summer School through a grant I received from SAAB at Lewis & Clark. CPA Summer School is a non-credit weeklong experience of transdisciplinary lectures, talks on graduate school and the job market, and 1:1 meetings with well-known scholars.
This summer focused on the theme “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” and featured a wide range of scholars. I will present my experience at the conference, give a brief overview of the different arguments presented each day and the philosophy behind CPA, explain how this experience will shape the duration of my undergraduate studies, and lay out other opportunities Philosophy majors can participate in.
Abstract:
Many say that we are suffering from a crisis of a lack of trust in science in this country. In response, significant effort has been lavished on improving science communication—with the aim of promoting such trust. But it’s not always clear what “trust of science” ought to mean. Does “science” really deserve “our” trust? Why? Without compelling answers to these questions, we are rudderless when it comes to improving the relationship between science and the public. I will attempt to steer us in a better direction.
Please attend, and please encourage your colleagues, students, and friends to attend.
Do you have a philosophical question you’re itching to discuss with like-minded individuals? Are you new to philosophy and want to learn more about it in a supportive environment? Just looking for a fun, stimulating conversation? We’ve got you covered!
Every week, Philosophy Club hosts Coffee Hour, a time for philosophy nerds and novices alike to gather, meet, and engage. All are welcome to attend, whether you’re a seasoned philosophy major or have no background at all. Please join us every Thursday at 4pm in the Philosophy Department Lounge (Howard 214). We have coffee, tea, and snacks for everybody. Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions using this form so that we can accommodate you.
What is the relevance of history to emancipatory struggles in the present? This paper draws on Michel Foucault to explain how genealogy–a philosophical mode of historical investigation–can contribute to contemporary struggles against violence and domination. Whereas philosophers have claimed that genealogy must analyze the past from a neutral perspective, I argue instead for a pragmatic conception of genealogy, according to which genealogy borrows normative commitments from agents already involved in political struggles. On the basis of such commitments, genealogy seeks to refine agents’ understandings of political problems, by demonstrating the link between their immediate normative demands and broader structures and power relations. To provide an example, I explain how recently published lectures by Foucault broaden critiques of penal power by establishing the functional role of prisons and policing in modern capitalism.
There have been sizable discussions over whether one is entitled to time off from work when becoming a parent to a child, namely the right to parental leave. However, not much has been said about whether we should be able to take time off to grieve when we lose a parent. The Confucians are against such asymmetrical attention to the beginning-of-life versus end-of-life events. To the surprise of many, as a school of thought centered on leaning into social roles, the Confucians think it is both necessary and good to withdraw from social functioning entirely and practice ritualized rumination over the deceased for an extended period. The Confucians also call for understanding grief not merely as an inner state but also as a social performance. Moreover, the society as a collective has a stake in the issue and is obligated to provide the proper structural support for extended, focused bereavement. In this talk, I reconstruct the classical Confucian arguments of grief with a focus on the following questions: What is grief? What is the normative role of grief? Why is grief a political emotion? Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s claim that we can and should cultivate love to achieve justice, I argue that the classical Confucian perspective is particularly valuable as it sheds light on this often-neglected aspect of human life in Western political discourse.