Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics
2011, in Christian Miller (ed.), The Continuum (or Bloomsbury) Companion to Ethics.
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Added by: Nick NovelliIntroduction: Part I of this article discusses the nature of virtue ethics as a type of normative ethical theory, alongside primarily consequentialism and Kantianism. However, since the virtue concepts are central to all types of virtue ethics, attention needs to be paid to the notion of virtue as an excellence of character, and related notions such as the virtue concepts as aplied to actions (e.g., kind act). Part II discusses the notion of virtue as an excellence of character, while part III further elucidates the nature of virtue ethics by considering a number of central but selected issues, such as the notion of virtuous action and virtue ethical conceptions of right action. Needless to say not all of interest can be treated here.Comment: A good, detailed overview of virtue ethics, including a good examination of the degree of diversity virtue ethical views can have. It would serve as a good first introduction to the topic, either in an undergraduate course on moral theory generally or virtue ethics specifically.
Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View
2003, Clarendon Press.
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Added by: Nick NovelliPublisher's Note: This book offers a comprehensive virtue ethics that breaks from the tradition of eudaimonistic virtue ethics. In developing a pluralistic view, it shows how different 'modes of moral response' such as love, respect, appreciation, and creativity are all central to the virtuous response and thereby to ethics. It offers virtue ethical accounts of the good life, objectivity, rightness, demandingness, and moral epistemology.Comment: This book offers an interesting, distinctive form of virtue ethics. It would be valuable as a different perspective and an illustration of the different directions one can take virtue theory. Due to its complexity, it is best taught to graduate students or upper-level/honours undergraduates, who have already received a grounding in the fundamentals of virtue ethics.
Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. Exorcising Hegel’s ghost: Africa’s challenge to philosophy
1998, African Studies Quarterly 1(4)
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Added by: Sara Peppe, Contributed by: Jonathan EgidAbstract:
Anyone who has lived with, worked on, and generally hung out with philosophy as long as I have and who, and this is a very important element, inhabits the epidermal world that it has pleased fate to put me in, and is as engaged with both the history of that epidermal world and that of philosophy, must at a certain point come upon the presence of a peculiar absence: the absence of Africa from the discourse of philosophy. In the basic areas of philosophy (e.g.. epistemology, metaphysics, axiology, and logic) and in the many derivative divisions of the subject (e.g., the philosophy of ...) once one begins to look, once one trains one's eyes to apprehend it, one is struck by the absence of Africa from the disquisitions of its practitioners.
Comment: A good way of responding to Hegel's denigrating views of Africans and Enlightenment racism more generally. Could be used in a class on philosophy and colonialism, or the global reception of German idealism.
TallBear, Kim. Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sexuality
2016, Lecture. The Ecologies of Social Difference Research Network. University of British Columbia
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Added by: Sonja Dobroski and Quentin PharrAbstract:
Lecture as part of the Social Justice Institute Noted Scholars Lecture Series, co-presented by the Ecologies of Social Difference Research Network at the University of British Columbia.Comment: available in this Blueprint
Tan, Sor-Hoon. Why Equality and Which Inequalities?: A Modern Confucian Approach to Democracy
2016, Philosophy East and West 66(2): 488–514
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Wilson LeeAbstract:
Abstract: This article challenges the conventional view that Confucianism has no place for the value of equality by shifting the focus from direct justification of equality (Why equality?) to concerns about actual social and political problems (Which inequalities are objectionable?). From this perspective, early Confucian texts endorse some inequalities, in particular those based on virtue, while objecting to others, especially socioeconomic inequalities. Confucians do not consider equality or inequality as inherently valuable, but evaluate them in relation to issues of good government.
Comment: Coming from a Confucian perspective, the paper examines the relation between equality and democracy with implications for both reconstructing Confucian political philosophy for today and democratic theory as such. This is an important point of dialogue for Anglophone political philosophers to have a more objective picture of Confucian political philosophy instead of the usual imperialist caricatures. The point of dialogue is also being explored by a Singaporean scholar in Singapore (despite having been once a crown colony its scholarship is unfortunately very much ignored in the Anglophone world), whose work and life lies at the intersection of Chinese and Anglo-European intellectual traditions.
Tangwa, Godfrey. Revisiting the Language Question in African Philosophy
2017, Adeshina Afolayan, Toyin Falola (eds.): The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 129-140
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Added by: Sara Peppe and Björn FreterAbstract:
One of the multiple effects of colonialism in Africa was the suppression and marginalization of African indigenous languages and the imposition and valorization of colonial languages which thus became the exclusive vectors of modern education, religious proselytization, and international communication and dialogue. After independence, this language situation led to a series of debates centered on what should be the appropriate language of pedagogy, scholarship, and artistic expression in Africa. Having successfully struggled against colonialism, should Africans continue using the colonially imposed foreign languages for their teaching, knowledge production, artistic and literary expression, to the continued detriment of the colonially marginalized indigenous languages? In this chapter, Tangwa revisits the language problematic in Africa from the vantage position of one who had actively participated in the language debates in the early 1990s. Tangwa briefly considers the purpose, functions, and uses of language in general, the relationship between language and culture, and the polar positions in the language debate in Africa. The chapter ends with a brief examination of the contemporary situation in the evolution of the language problem and makes a recommendation on what appears to be the only way forward.Comment (from this Blueprint): An up-to-date, concise and solid overview of the language problem in African philosophy.
Tangwa, Godfrey B.. Bioethics: An African perspective
1996, Bioethics, 10: 183-200.
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Added by: Clotilde TorregrossaAbstract: In this paper I have attempted to open a window on an African approach to Bioethics - that of the Nso' of the Bamenda Highlands of Kamerun - from the vantage position of someone who has familiarity with both African and Western cultures. Because of its scientific-cum-technological sophistication and its proselytising character, Western culture, as well as Western systems of thought and practice, have greatly affected and influenced other cultures, particularly African culture. But Western culture, systems of thought and practice, have been highly impervious and immune to influences from other cultures, philosophies, systems of thought and practice, even where these might have been salutary and enriching to Western culture and systems. What I have here termed Nso' eco-bio-cummunitarianism clearly indicates a viable alternative world-view within which some of the bioethical perplexities and controversies of today might be more satisfactorily resolved than within a Western framework. I have further attempted to show, by way of example, how within such a world-view, abortion and suicide, for instance, would be disapproved of while euthanasia, in its etymological purity, is approved of
Tangwa, Godfrey B.. Elements of African Bioethics in a Western Frame
2010, Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Jonathan WolffAbstract: For millennia, Africans have lived on the African continent, in close contact with the diversities of nature: floral, faunal and human; and in so doing they have developed cultures, values, attitudes and perspectives to the problems, ethical and otherwise, that have arisen from the existential pressures of their situation. The problem, however, is that such values and perspectives do not necessarily form coherent ethical theories. Theory-making is a second order activity requiring a certain amount of leisure and comfort which the existential conditions of life on the African continent have not easily permitted in the retrospect-able past. The elements of African bioethics are to be found in its cultural values, traditions, customs and practices. These are research-able, highlight-able and usable by those who would. The bioethical problems of our current global existential situation are such that all possible solutions, no matter their provenance, ought to be tried. Western culture has far too loud a voice combined with deaf ears in contemporary ethical discourse. But it should never be forgotten that other cultures have their own word to say and that alternative values, ways of thinking and practices exist, and attempt should always be made to bring these out and to highlight them, if they could possibly contribute to the satisfactory solution of a global problem. This book brings together various papers on bioethical issues and problems, written at different times, some previously published, each of which attempts to bring out some African elements, perspective or concern. The African narrative style predominates through these essays but their framing conforms, more or less, to the Western paradigm for presenting academic issues.Comment: Could be used in 'global bioethics' classes.
Tarica, Estelle. The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism
2008, University of Minnesota Press
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Added by: Adriana Clavel-VázquezPublisher’s Note:
Tarica examines Rosario Castellanos’ Indigenism in her literary work, particularly in her fictional autobiography Balún Canán (The Nine Guardians). Tarica argues that the novel is an examination of the interaction of Castellanos’ mestiza and female identities, and that it concludes with the constitution of an “utterly lonely figure”. Nevertheless, Tarica argues that the inclusion of other protagonists, such as the protagonist’s Mayan nanny, allow for Castellanos to examine the coloniality of power and the appropriation of indigenous identities. According to Tarica, this allows Castellanos to present the protagonist not as a heroine, but as an antiheroine that offers an “absolutely partial version of national events”, and who manages to affirm herself only in “a place of solitary wandering: Uranga’s Nepantla as in-betweenness.Comment (from this Blueprint): Rosario Castellanos’ examination of mestiza identity as being in-between proves an interesting test to the criticisms of Indigenismo suggested by Villoro. It reveals a complex relation between the mestiza protagonist and the Indigenous cause. Castellanos also offers an opportunity to think about mestizaje from a feminist perspective. When it comes to mestiza, rather than mestizo, consciousness, we find a double displacement. She is out of place insofar as she finds herself in between European and Indigenous cultures. But she is also out of place because, as a woman, she cannot fully be a citizen of the mestizo nation and neither can she go back to an Indigenous culture to which she doesn’t belong.
Taylor, Elanor. Explanation and The Right to Explanation
2023, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1:1-16
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Added by: Deryn Mair ThomasAbstract:
In response to widespread use of automated decision-making technology, some have considered a right to explanation. In this paper I draw on insights from philosophical work on explanation to present a series of challenges to this idea, showing that the normative motivations for access to such explanations ask for something difficult, if not impossible, to extract from automated systems. I consider an alternative, outcomes-focused approach to the normative evaluation of automated decision-making, and recommend it as a way to pursue the goods originally associated with explainability.
Comment: This paper offers a clear overview of the literature on the right to explanation and counters the mainstream view that, in the context of automated decision-making technology, that we hold such a right. It would therefore offer a useful introduction to ideas about explanability in relation to the ethics of AI and automated technologies, and could be used in a reading group context as well as in upper undergraduate and graduate level courses.
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