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Diversity Reading List

Helping you include authors from under-represented groups in your teaching

Slavery and the Possibility of Portraiture

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Draws attention to the fact that portraits of slaves are rarely exhibited or discussed; and that not all images of slaves are portraits. Reflects on the dynamics of power involved in portraiture and on the relation between subject and viewer in particular. Includes extensive commentary on the historical development of portraiture and the place of portraits of slaves therein.

Posted in Aesthetic Representation, Aesthetics, Depiction, Value TheoryTagged depiction, portrait, portraiture, slaveryLeave a comment

Myra: a Portrait of a Portrait

Posted on November 27, 2017June 26, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Considers philosophical problems with representation, particularly in regard to the loss of particularity and individuality in instances when an identity takes on symbolic proportions. Hindley, the woman, has been totally merged with Hindley, the monster. Her particularity has been subsumed as a two-dimensional stereotype by having her photo treated with obsessive media attention by being repetitively linked to that same hated stereotype.

Posted in Aesthetic Representation, Aesthetics, Depiction, Value TheoryTagged depiction, portrait, representation, stereotypeLeave a comment

Picturing Yourself: Portraits, Self-Consciousness, and Modernist Style

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Focuses on the modernist literary portrait in general and on Wilde’s novel in particular. Also contains multiple references to painted portraits. Argues that queer modernist portraits concentrate on dynamic aspects of style and personality, presenting both the sitter’s style and personality and the personality of the artist who renders her. Explores how style becomes another vehicle where a dangerous homosociality can be reduced into a manifestation of the merely particular (and vice versa).

Posted in Aesthetic Representation, Aesthetics, Depiction, Painting and Drawing, Philosophy of Gender Race and Sexuality, Queer Theory, Value TheoryTagged modernism, Oscar Wilde, personality, portrait, portraitureLeave a comment

From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Should Be Made!

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Follow-up essay on her ‘From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made’ (note the one-word difference in the title). Adds the idea that medical professionals have at least a mild duty to cultivate aesthetic judgment of individuals with biological differences. Also makes the case that beauty is not the same thing as attractiveness or normalcy.

Posted in Aesthetics, Aesthetics and Culture, Applied Ethics, Body Aesthetics, Disability, Value TheoryTagged attractiveness, beauty, disability, normalcyLeave a comment

From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Starting from our appreciation of cubist portraits, asks why it to commonplace for us to contemplate distorted depictions of faces with eagerness and enjoyment but to be repelled by real people whose physiognomies resemble the depicted ones. Argues that the aesthetic process that permits our attraction to portrayed human anomalies can be expanded so as to offset the devalued social positioning of real people whose physiognomic features are anomalous. Presenting an anomaly as originality rather than deviance is crucial.

Posted in Aesthetics, Aesthetics and Culture, Applied Ethics, Body Aesthetics, Disability, Value TheoryTagged anomaly, beauty, disability, originalityLeave a comment

Portrait, Fact and Fiction

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Considers portraiture an unstable, destabilizing, potentially subversive art through which uncomfortable and unsettling convictions are negotiated. As such, it is primarily an instrumental art form, a kind of agency. Also argues that there is an element of the fictive involved in all portrait representations. Explains how portraiture is a slippery and seductive art.

Posted in Aesthetic Representation, Aesthetics, Depiction, Value TheoryTagged depiction, fiction, portrait, representationLeave a comment

Objects of Appropriation

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: Walsh and Lopes argue that some appropriation can be beneficial and productive: in particular, the appropriation of elements of dominant culture by members of culturally marginalized groups. They explore this idea through discussion of such appropriative artwork by a number of contemporary First Nations artists, which they argue challenges “the assumed alignment of appropriator with oppressor and appropriatee with victim”(227).

Posted in Aesthetics, Aesthetics and Culture, Crosscultural Aesthetics, Culture and Cultures, Social and Political Philosophy, Value TheoryTagged art, cultural appropriation, cultural property, cultureLeave a comment

Art, Property Rights, and the Interests of Humanity

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: In this paper, Thompson sets up a potential tension between two kinds of cases. On the one hand, we might think it is wrong for a wealthy collector to destroy great works of Western art that have value for all of humanity. On the other hand, we might think it is acceptable for indigenous peoples to rebury or ritually destroy artifacts from their culture, even though these works might also have value for all of humanity. How do we reconcile these intuitions? After discussing and dismissing attempts to resolve the problem by appeal to the value of the property for its possessors or the desires of non-owners, Thompsons suggests that by looking at the value of art in the context of different cultural traditions we can see why a certain universalism about the value of art will tell against allowing the destruction of artwork by the wealthy collector, but allow for the reburial or destruction of artifacts by certain indigenous communities.

Posted in Aesthetics, History of Western Philosophy, non-Western art, Property Rights, Social and Political Philosophy, The Value of Art, Value TheoryTagged art, destroying art, property rightsLeave a comment

Repatriation and the Concept of Inalienable Possession

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: The concept of inalienable possession often figures centrally in debates about repatriation of cultural artifacts (which are also often artworks). The right of alienability (or the right to transfer title to property) is one of the core rights in Western property theory. If property is inalienable, this means that title to it cannot rightly be transferred. In this paper, Coleman analyzes the concept of inalienable possession, and argues that laws (such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)) can foist a conception of inalienable possession on indigenous peoples that can be inaccurate to past and changing cultural norms. She uses this point to offer a distinction between property and ownership. This opens up conceptual space for a link between objects and identity through ownership that might nevertheless allow for the alienability of such property.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art and Artworks, non-Western art, Property Rights, Social and Political Philosophy, Value TheoryTagged art, cultural artifact, cultural property, inalienable possession, ownership, property, property rights, rightsLeave a comment

Cultural Property and Collective Identity

Posted on November 27, 2017May 13, 2025 by Simon Fokt

Summary: This short paper examines the relationship between cultural property and collective identity through a close analysis of a paper by Richard Handler that questions such a relationship. In particular, Handler raises a version of common worries about the lack of cultural group continuity over time: because cultures are constantly changing, this fact is thought to undermine claims about the relationship between cultural identity and cultural property, as well as subsequent repatriation requests. Coleman pushes back against this objection by questioning what kind of identity or sameness is actually required for cultural continuity over time.

Posted in Applied Ethics, History of Western Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Value TheoryTagged continuity over time, cultural identity, cultural property, culture, repatriationLeave a comment

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abortion art art classification autonomy causation Chinese philosophy colonialism Confucianism consciousness consent culture depiction desire disability equality ethics experimental philosophy feminism feminist philosophy fiction free will gender identity imagination justice Kant knowledge language logic methodology mind models oppression perception portrait race racism rationality Rawls representation responsibility science sex truth virtue

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Anita Silvers Aristotle bell hooks Charles W. Mills Confucius David Hume David Lewis Delia Graff Fara Elisabeth von Böhmen Emilie Du Châtelet Friedrich Nietzsche G. E. Anscombe Georg Hegel Gottfried Leibniz Gottlob Frege Immanuel Kant Iris Marion Young Iris Murdoch Jennifer Jackson John Rawls Judith Jarvis Thomson Karl Marx Laozi Margaret Cavendish Mary Astell Mary Hesse Mary Midgley Maurice Merleau-Ponty Michel Foucault Pamela Sue Anderson Paul Grice Philippa Foot Plato René Descartes Rudolf Carnap Simone Weil Soran Reader Susan Hurley Val Plumwood Viola Cordova W. V. O. Quine Wilma Mankiller Xuanzang Zhuangzi Zhu Xi

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