The Confederate Battle Flag (CBF) is in the news again. On January 16th, 2000, 46,000 people came to Columbia, South Carolina, to protest its display over the state’s capital dome. On July 1st, the CBF was removed. But on the same day, it was raised in front of the Statehouse steps. The controversy has received a great deal of media coverage and was a factor in the 2000 presidential primaries. CBF displays raise a philosophical question I wish to address: What determines whether a symbol or symbol-display is racist? I will focus on the CBF because of its contemporary relevance. But the discussion will shed light on the general issue of when a symbol or symbol-display has a particular meaning and when it does not.

The ethical philosophies of Kant and Levinas would seem, on the surface, to be incompatible. In this essay. I attempt to reconcile them by situating Levinas’s philosophy “beneath” Kant’s as its existential condition thereby addressing two shortcomings in each of their works, for Kant. the apparent difficulty of making ethics apply to real concrete cases, and, for Levinas, the apparent difficulty of establishing a normative ethics that can offer prescriptions for moral behavior. My general thesis is that the existential ethical terrainunearthed by Levinas turns Kantian when transposed into the rational order.

The dilemma confronted by Buridan’s Ass leads into a problem about nil-preference situations, to which there is a solution in the literature that is inspired by Alan Turing: we have evolved with a computational module in our brains that comes into play in such situations by picking a random action among the alternatives that detennines the subject’s choice. We relate these Buridan’s Ass situations to a larger, theoretically interesting category in which there is no alternative that is decisively superior to others with respect to expected utility, and we try to show how our emotional makeup figures in a rational response, particularly as informed by symbolic utilitythat we draw down from our culture’s shared understandings. The category is theoretically interesting because it contains moral dilemmas, as well as hard cases in which an imponant choice must be made without an option that has clearly superior expected utility. We argue that our Emotional Response Model is preferable to Turing’s Randomizer for this category, as well as more illuminating about nil-preference situations or close approximations thereto.

This essay does not argue for any specific conception of time as ethically superior or significant, but argues that the conception of time we choose from among possible such conceptions has ethical consequences.

Much of Ian Hacking’s recent work has concerned the notion of ‘human kinds’, that is, ways of classifying people as objects of study in the human and social sciences. In this paper, I use a study of the development of a particular kind of person---the punk rocker---to clarify and extend the idea of a human kind. With regard to clarification, this case provides an excellent opportunity to consider examples of what Hacking calls ‘looping effects’, i. e. particular kinds of interactions between ways of classifying people and those who are classified. As for extending Hacking’s ideas, in punk we see a sort of kind creation largely absent from the examples he has considered. While the human kinds Hacking has focused on typically emerge from investigations by experts and then filter out intopopular consciousness, in punk we see the opposite process take place.

The essay challenges the de facto dichotomy between the discipline of logic and the activity of social criticism, i.e., it provides an illustrated reminder to philosophers that the gulf between these two areas of philosophy is not quite as wide as our curriculum andspecialization designations tend to suggest. Social criticism plays some necessary roles in certain branches of logic, and the second-order accounting of the contents of these branches leads back to social criticism. These points suggest an adjusted conception of logic that would, among other things, render phrases such as “applying logic to social criticism” as misleading since certain branches of logic would not even coherently exist apart from social criticism. The lead illustrations are the identification of basic, pervasive, and thought-impeding logical errors that have been missed by numerous logic texts, and the assessment of contemporary academic logic as properly a quest for communal sanity that lies caught between communal insanity and communal mendacity.

Thompson (1994) proposed a re-visioning of the oikos/polis dichotomy in classical philosophy. She offers a dual systems paradigm based on two ancient Greek mythemes---Hestia, goddess of the oikos, or domestic “homeplace,” and Hermes, god of the polis, or public “marketplace,” as an alternative to gender as the primary analytic lens to advance feminist theory. This paper applies hestian/hermean lenses of analysis, described in two propadeutic papers (SPCW 1996; 1997), to the writings of 6th-5th century BCEPythagorean women philosophers and 19th century domestic scientists to claim them as moral philosophers of the hestian domain.