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1. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Courtney E. Cole Afrikaner Claims for Cultural Recognition: Problematizing the Western Discourse of Multiculturalism
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When assessing the history of Afrikaners domination in South Africa and its current fragile status in the new dispensation, what becomes clear is that their claims for cultural recognition and protection turn contemporary Western discourse regarding multiculturalism on its ear. In this paper, I organize my discussion of recognition of Afrikaners in contemporary South Africa by first giving some background on Afrikaners, as well as their history and current status in South Africa. I go on to examine how the notions of “cultural identity” and “cultural worth” problematize and complicate these ideas as they are employed in Western discourse of multiculturalism.
2. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Krassimir Stojanov The Issue of the Cosmopolitan Identities and the Third Way between Cultural Embeddement and Liberal Autonomy
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This paper attempts to develop an alternative to both classical liberal claims about individual autonomy and communitarian claims about cultural embeddement of the individual. It shows a way to develop a new model of subjectivity through an interpretation at the level of a deeply located, coherent self. This self is the core of personal identity as a pluralisticly structured, decentralized, internalization of Ego - Alter Ego relationships. This concept is clarified by a critical interpretation and reformulation of Jeremy Waldron’s concept of cosmopolitan identities.
3. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Dawn Jakubowski Beyond Cultural Survival: Transforming Subjectivity
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This paper hinges on the idea that our subjectivities---how individuals come to an understanding about themselves, their relationship to each other and their place in the world---are profoundly affected by the intersubjective quality of recognition we receive from others. Rooted within the Hegelian dialectical perspective, the desire for recognition stems from the view that a major part of our identities are formed through social relations. Misrecognition, in its various forms, promotes fundamental injustices. This is a point that the traditional modernist approach to political philosophy bypasses because of its focus on procedural rather than ethical issues of injustice.
4. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Eddy Souffrant Reflections on Transnationalism: Defining the Refugee
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This paper explores Charles Taylor’s conception of an inclusive liberal polity. It argues that contemporary immigration challenges even Taylor’s inclusive liberalism by revealing that liberalism is inherently exclusionary and that the exclusionary tendency reinforces liberalism’s peculiar ability to cultivate refugees at both the national and transnational levels.
5. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Gillian Brock Why the Heldian Model of Cosmopolitan Democracy Retains Its Promise Despite Kymlicka’s Criticisms
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Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitans maintain that no national categories of people deserve special weight and that, instead, all people everywhere should be objects of moral concern. Arguably, the most developed of these accounts is the cosmopolitan democracy model articulated by David Held, so it is not surprising that it has received the most attention and criticism. In this paper, I outline Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy and consider the objections Will Kymlicka raises to this account. I argue that Kymlicka’s objections do not undermine Held’s central claims and that Held’s cosmopolitanismremains a very promising model that deserves further attention.
6. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Jon Mahoney Cosmopolitanism as a Moral Imperative
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In this paper I consider and respond to two arguments against cosmopolitanism, the membership needs argument and the preferential treatment argument. I argue that if there are reasonable grounds for endorsing universal norms such as human rights, then there are no reasonable grounds for rejecting moral cosmopolitanism.
7. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Neil Levy The Intrinsic Value of Cultures
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Our intuitions concerning cultures show that we are committed to thinking that they are intrinsically valuable. I set out the conditions under which we attribute such value to cultures, and show that coming to possess intrinsic value is a matter of having the right kind of causal history.
8. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Nicholas Dixon Light Trucks, Road Safety and the Environment
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Driving light trucks creates the risk of significant harm to other people. Compared to regular cars, light trucks endanger the occupants of other vehicles more and have a markedly more negative impact on the environment. Consequently, many people who currently drive light trucks ought to switch to smaller vehicles.
9. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Jason Borenstein Expertise and Epistemology: Can Laypersons Assess the Claims of Experts?
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The purpose of this paper is to explore whether laypersons can competently evaluate the specialized claims offered by experts. Since it is a lack of knowledge about a subject area that makes someone a layperson with respect to that area, the layperson may be unable to understand and assess what an expert knows.
10. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Mark Letteri Thinking, Philosophical Counseling, and the Purity of Philosophical Method
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In “A General Framework for Philosophical Counseling,” Hakam AI-Shawi argues that “philosophical counseling must ... avoid relyingon any first-order philosophical assumptions.” In this light, I explore whether and to what extent an applied Heideggerian approach to the amelioration of human life - in this case, Daseinsanalysis - satisfies this criterion. I focus on the orienting reality of a mortal, interpreting questioner dwelling in particular circumstances. Such an approach, as I construe it here, seems largely compatible with AI-Shawi’s understanding of what can properly count as philosophical counselling.
11. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Joseph Grünfeld Shusterman’s Epicurean Aesthetics
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For Shusterman, all experience is a form of understanding, but this makes it difficult for him to explain how we can be mistaken about our experience. His preference for rap remains idiosyncratic, as is his notion of the art of living. In spite of his postmodernist stance, he continues to generalize about what he takes to be the body and about the nature of art. But what “works” in art depends on a variety of subjective factors we come to know only by hindsight. What he dismisses as intellectualist bias in modern art and linguistic philosophy has deep roots in our culture: a demand for precision and verifiability that make science and technology possible. This is not a mere puritanical prejudice.
12. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Steven Schroeder George Berkeley’s Embodied Vision
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Taking up John of Salisbury’s dictum that we read ancient texts to improve our eyesight, this article returns to an “old” book for “new” insight into the perennial philosophical problem of visual perception. A careful reading of Berkeley’s essay on vision improves our eyesight in at least four ways: First, it reminds us that the most interesting aspects of visual perception are not “primary” but “derivative.” Second, it reminds us that our relationship with the world is an interactive process of making connections and proposes some ways in which those connections and the process of making them might be brought to consciousness and subjected to critical examination. Third, it reminds us of the extent to which making connections is a linguistic process: we live in language as surely as we live in the world, and the processes by which we take our places in the world are forms of language. Fourth, it introduces a concept of “levels” and movement between them that is particularly important to computational models that may result in nonhuman analogues of human vision.
13. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Andrew W. Schwartz Affirmative Action and Electoral Engineering: Two Forms of Race-Conscious Distracting
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Majority-Minority electoral districts, while increasing the number of minorities in legislatures, work to deepen divisions among racial groups, to exacerbate the systematic disadvantages of some individuals, and to impede effective representation. I examine another form of race-conscious districting that will increase marginalized minority presence in legislatures while avoiding these problems.
14. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Ron Sandler Environmental Ethics and the Need to Motivate Pro-Environmental Behavior
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In this article I argue that it is appropriate for environmental ethicists to be concerned with the practical efficacy of their arguments. Such a concern follows from a commonly accepted construal of what would constitute an adequate environmental ethic and it finds precedent in the history of philosophy.
15. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Patricia Shipley, Fernando Leal Is Practical Philosophy for Private Profit or Public Good?: A Critical View of the Practical Turn in Contemporary Philosophy
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This paper takes a critical look at the rise of the practice of philosophy in the market place in late modernity. Two main forms of such practice are identified: the practice of Socratic Dialogue in small groups in organisations and one-to-one philosophical counselling of individual 'clients'. The relevance of professionalism for commercialised applied practical philosophy is discussed. Philosophical counsellors in particular may be at risk of engaging with vulnerable individuals who are in need of protection from practitioners who are not trained to deal with their problems. Psychology is the discipline which is most related to practical philosophy and it is growing in ethical awareness. This paper emphasises the importance of ethics for philosophy in practice. There is a pressing need for eternal vigilance by practitioners from such disciplines, whether professionalised or not, in the complex modern'runaway world'.
16. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
David Beisecker Dennett and the Quest for Real Meaning: In Defense of a “Myth”
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In several recent pieces, Daniel Dennett has advanced a line of reasoning purporting to show that we should reject the idea that there is a tenable distinction to be drawn between the manner in which we represent the way things are and the manner in which "blessedly simple" intentional systems like thermostats and frogs represent the way things are. Through a series of thought experiments, Dennett aims to show that philosophers of mind should abandon their preoccupation with "real meaning as opposed to ersatz meaning, 'intrinsic' or 'original ' intentionality as opposed to derived intentionality. " In this paper, I lay out the case that Dennett builds against original intentionality, with the aim of showing that, once it has been properly clarified, the notion of original intentionality isn't nearly the myth that Dennett makes it out to be.
17. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Suzanne Laba Cataldi Making a Game of Killing: Fantasy, Reality and the Violence at Columbine High School
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This paper focuses on the disturbing mixture of fantasy with reality in the massacre at Columbine, where the perpetrators appear to have made a game or 'fun' of their killing Because of the deception involved and despite their immersion in violent media, I argue that they could not have been totally confused about the difference between play and actual violence. Huizinga's notion of play and Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis are applied to the situation.
18. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Jean Chambers Ethicists as Architects: Revising Moral Theory Using All the Tools
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As James Coleman and Allan Gibbard have suggested, human morality may be viewed as a feedback control system. Each of the standard normative ethical theories emphasizes only part of this complex system. Social reform requires both new theoretical syntheses and a practical effort to better uphold ideal norms.
19. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Luciano Floridi Information Ethics: An Environmental Approach to the Digital Divide
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As a full expression of techne, the information society has already posed fundamental ethical problems, whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidlyevolving. What is the best strategy to construct an information society that is ethically sound? This is the question I discuss in this paper. The task is to formulate aninformation ethics that can treat the world of data, information, knowledge and communication as a new environment, the infosphere. This information ethics must be able to address and solve the ethical challenges arising in the new environment on the basis of the fundamental principles of respect for information, its conservation and valorisation. It must be an ecological ethics for the information environment.
20. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
J. M. Fritzman "Why I Hardly Read Althusser": Reading Habermas Hardly Reading Althusser
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This article discusses Habermas' rejections of the orthodoxy of the philosophy of history, ethical socialism, and scientism. It urges that his attempt to derive rationality and morality from consensus fails, and so he does lapse into ethical socialism. However, ethical socialism only appears to be something to avoidbecause of his belief that consensus could generate rationality and morality. Once the impossibility of that is recognized, ethical socialism can be rehabilitated. Hence, Althusser's version of ethical socialism escapes Habermas' censure.