Diversity Reading List

Introduction: Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago, we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the tartan, why life was so confusing. Today there is similar trouble over the question whether there is, or is not, something called Human Nature. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of animal behaviour studies, and comparisons between animals and men have become immensely popular. People use evidence from animals to decide whether man is naturally aggressive, or naturally territorial; even whether he has an Aggressive or Territorial Instinct. On the other hand, many sociologists and psychologists still seem to hold the Behaviourist view that man is a creature entirely without instincts, and so do existentialist philosophers. If so, all comparison with animals must be irrelevant. On that view, man is entirely the product of his culture. He starts off infinitely plastic, and is formed completely by the society in which he grows up.

Abstract: All of us are, more or less, in trouble today about trying to understand cultures strange to us. We hear constantly of alien customs. We see changes in our lifetime which would have astonished our parents. I want to discuss here one very short way of dealing with this difficulty, a drastic way which many people now theoretically favour. It consists in simply denying that we can ever understand any culture except our own well enough to make judgements about it. Those who recommend this hold that the world is sharply divided into separate societies, sealed units, each with its own system of thought. They feel that the respect and tolerance due from one system to another forbids us ever to take up a critical position to any other culture. Moral judgement, they suggest, is a kind of coinage valid only in its country of origin.

<strong>Abstract:</strong> The development of social epistemology in recent decades is a welcome turn away from Cartesian individualism. But the centrality of oppression to societies in general is still insufficiently recognized in this literature. This chapter looks at “white ignorance” as an example of a particular kind of systemic group-based miscognition that has been hugely influential over the past few hundred years. After a ten-point clarification of the concept, it turns to an examination of white ignorance as it plays itself out in the complex interaction of Eurocentric perception and categorization, white normativity, social memory and social amnesia, the derogation of non-white testimony, racial group interests, and motivated irrationality.

Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to discuss how the legal metaphors in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason can help us understand the work's transcendental argumentation. I discuss Dieter Henrich's claim that legal deductions form a methodological paradigm for all three Critiques that exempts the deductions from following a stringent logical structure. I also consider Rüdiger Bubner's proposal that the legal metaphors show that the transcendental deduction is a rhetorical argument. On the basis of my own reading of the many different uses of legal analogies in the first Critique, I argue that they cannot form a consistent methodological paradigm as Henrich and Bubner claim.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach to the question of meaning in life by criticizing Thaddeus Metz's objectivist theory in his book Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. The author proposes the concept of 'the heart of meaning in life,' which alone can answer the question, 'Alas, does my life like this have any meaning at all?' and demonstrates that 'the heart of meaning in life' cannot be compared, in principle, with other people's meaning in life. The answer to the question of 'the heart of meaning in life' ought to have two values, yes-or-no, and there is no ambiguous gray zone between them.This concept constitutes the very central content of meaning in life.

Introduction: In his book, Freedom of the Individual, Stuart Hampshire argues as follows. In human beings (as opposed to things) power a function of will and will is a function of desire. Some desires are "thought-dependent" in that they depend on statable beliefs which, if they altered,- would alter the desires, and so such desires cannot be defined by purely behavioural criteria, since the subject’s conception of what he wants is constitutive of the wanting. We do not discover our thought-dependent desires inductively, by observation, we formulate them in the light of our beliefs. We have the experience of being convinced by evidence and of changing our beliefs and so willing differently, and there seems to be no set of sufficient conditions outside our thinking which could explain this situation equally well. [...] I wish to make an entry into Professor Hampshire’s argument at the point where he dismisses the doctrine of the transcendent will.

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Back matter: This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles.

Abstract: Nussbaum argues for a cognitivist theory of emotions, whereby an emotion is similar to a judgement. An emotion has an intentional object which is being evaluated as e.g. bad for one. On her view, our emotional reactions to different situations are connected to the idea of eudaimonia, and emotions could be seen as a guide to a flourishing life. As such, Nussbaum aims to explain how certain emotions feel like they're tearing us apart (e.g. grieving a dead family member), since they are literally bad for us. She thus departs from the Jamsian tradition whereby the psychological component of an emotion is emphasised (or emotions are sometimes reduced to physiological responses), and argues instead that the physiological response is not a necessary component of an emotion.

Abstract: Conceptions of individual autonomy and of rational autonomy have played large parts in twentieth century moral philosophy, yet it is hard to see how either could be basic to morality. Kant's conception of autonomy is radically different. He predicated autonomy neither of individual selves nor of processes of choosing, but of principles of action. Principles of action are Kantianly autonomous only if they are law-like in form and could be universal in scope; they are heteronomous if, although law-like in form, they cannot have universal scope. Puzzles about claims linking morality, reason and autonomy are greatly reduced by recognising the distinctiveness of Kantian autonomy