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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Olivia Maegaard NielsenAbstract: In assessing the likely credibility of a claim or judgment, is it ever relevant to take into account the social identity of the person who has made the claim? There are strong reasons, political and otherwise, to argue against the epistemic relevance of social identity. However, there are instances where social identity might be deemed relevant, such as in determinations of criminal culpability where a relatively small amount of evidence is the only basis for the decision and where social prejudices can play a role in inductive reasoning. This paper explores these issues.Comment: This essay asks the question of whether and how the identity of a knower should be taken into account when judging their epistemic credibility. It explores different ways in which such a relationship might be understood and concludes that it is not irrational to take the identity of the knower into account. While her starting point is in the legal context of jury selection, the question applies much more broadly to (social) epistemological questions. It also shows why it is helpful to take social relations into account in epistemological inquiries. The text would therefore be suitable to read in many different contexts, but for example, in seminars on social epistemology, on identity, or on metaphilosophical questions.
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Added by: Hans Maes, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract: This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image's power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, or revelation of the essential "air" (to use Roland Barthes' term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography's alleged 'realism' and 'transparency,' it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture's two aims, the revelatory and the expressive.Comment: Considers two fundamental but conflicting aims of portraiture: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. Explores how the two media of painting and photography might differ. Argues that despite photography's alleged 'realism' and 'transparency,' it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture's two aims, the revelatory and the expressive.
Artworks to use with this text:
Richard Avedon, Jacob Israel Avedon (1969-1973)
Photographs of the artist's dying father. These frank portraits succeed at both artistic expression and the subtle rendering of the sitter's inner psychological states or character. Considers two fundamental but conflicting aims of portraiture: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. Explores how the two media of painting and photography might differ. Argues that despite photography's alleged 'realism' and 'transparency,' it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture's two aims, the revelatory and the expressive.
Artworks to use with this text:
Richard Avedon, Jacob Israel Avedon (1969-1973)
Photographs of the artist's dying father. These frank portraits succeed at both artistic expression and the subtle rendering of the sitter's inner psychological states or character.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons - even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today's supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners' sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused - when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being.Comment: This text serves as both a clear introduction to the history of punishment and imprisonment in the United States, as well as a clear introduction to phenomenological method. Portions of the text on the experience of social death in solitary confinement would make excellent additions to introductory courses on prisons and punishment. Some chapters would also be fitting on classes concerning race and mass incarceration.
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Added by: Franci Mangraviti
From the Introduction: "Dorothea Olkowski’s chapter offers an analysis of the need to develop a logic of sense. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Olkowski defends formal logic against feminist theorists who have urged that we organize thinking around the principles of embodiment. She warns us against the complete merging of bodily functions and sense-making activities. In Olkowski’s view, feminists need to acknowledge the usefulness of logical analyses at the same time that they must insist on formal systems that reflect and are tempered by human and humane values."
Comment: available in this Blueprint
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Added by: Giada FratantonioSummary: The author questions the centrality of representation in perceptual experience that comes from a specific class of experience, namely, those experiences of the environment that compels you to act in a certain way.Comment: This could work as secondary reading for a postgraduate course on philosophy of perception.