Diversity Reading List

Summary: In conventional film photography, negatives are used in the darkroom to produce positive images, but in the outmoded medium Polaroid 665 the positive image is used to make a unique negative that can then be employed to make positive prints in the future. This generativity of the Polaroid 665 negative is used by the artist to mirror the complexity of feelings regarding intersex bodies. The series shows how negative affect can be productive and political, even when it appears to suspend agency.

Abstract:
Oriel College persists in displaying a statue of Cecil Rhodes, despite his role in British colonialism and despite opposition from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. This article considers arguments in support of Oriel's position—including three versions of the charge that removing the statue might distort history—and show that they all fail. I argue that the conclusion that the statue should be removed, despite possible costs and complexity, follows once we realise that the statue makes demands on our attention and once we correctly understand that the descendants of those previously oppressed by Rhodes and who are currently subject to racism have a special insight, standing and claim to shape the environment in which they study, work and live.

Publisher's Note: Just Business provides the first comprehensive, reasoned framework for resolving questions of business ethics and corporate governance. Innovative, accessible, and global in scope, its powerful Ethical Decision Model can be used to manage the ethical problems of business as they arise in all their complexity and variety. Just Business combines business realism with philosophical rigor, and demonstrates that it is not necessary to emasculate or to adulterate business for business to be ethical. The book benefits from Elaine Sternberg's extensive experience as an academic philosopher, an international investment banker, and head of successful businesses. She is now Principal of a London-headquartered consultancy firm, and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds.

Abstract: I address questions about values in model-making in engineering, specifically: Might the role of values be attributable solely to interests involved in specifying and using the model? Selected examples illustrate the surprisingly wide variety of things one must take into account in the model-making itself. The notions of system , and physically similar systems are important and powerful in determining what is relevant to an engineering model. Another example illustrates how an idea to completely re-characterize, or reframe, an engineering problem arose during model-making.I employ a qualitative analogue of the notion of physically similar systems. Historical cases can thus be drawn upon; I illustrate with a comparison between a geoengineering proposal to inject, or spray, sulfate aerosols, and two different historical cases involving the spraying of DDT . The current geoengineering proposal is seen to be like the disastrous and counterproductive case, and unlike the successful case, of the spraying of DDT. I conclude by explaining my view that model-making in science is analogous to moral perception in action, drawing on a view in moral theory that has come to be called moral particularism.

Abstract: Goals for adding philosophy to the school curriculum centre on the perceived need to improve the general quality of critical thinking found in society. School philosophy also provides a means for asking questions of value and purpose about curriculum content across and between subjects, and, furthermore, it affirms the capability of children to think philosophically. Two main routes suggested are the introduction of philosophy as a subject, and processes of facilitating philosophical discussions as a way of establishing classroom 'communities of inquiry'. This article analyses the place of philosophy in the school curriculum, drawing on three relevant examples of school curriculum reform: social studies, philosophy of science and Kura Kaupapa Māori.

Abstract:
In this paper, I make three arguments regarding Crisis Standards of Care developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I argue against the consideration of third person quality of life judgments that deprioritize disabled or chronically ill people on a basis other than their survival, even if protocols use the language of health to justify maintaining the supposedly higher well-being of non-disabled people. Second, while it may be unavoidable that some disabled people are deprioritized by triage protocols that must consider the likelihood that someone will survive intensive treatment, Crisis Standards of Care should not consider the amount or duration of treatment someone may need to survive. Finally, I argue that, rather than parsing who should be denied treatment to maximize lives saved, professional bioethicists should have put our energy into reducing the need for such choices at all by resisting the systemic injustices that drive the need for triage.

Summary: Traces the origins of, and eventually challenges, the idea that many people in non-industrialized countries refused to have their photographic portrait taken due to the belief that it would steal their soul. Investigates and refutes the evidence provided by Richard Andree, James Napier, James G. Frazer. With references to C.S. Peirce, Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag.

Publisher's Note: During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women's freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon's writing from two works - Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700) - and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer. Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English.

Publisher's Note: Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills’s claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.

“This anthology brings together some very prominent philosophers to address one of the most embarrassing and blatantly ignored elephants in philosophy: ignorance. While philosophers claim to be children of Socrates, who alone was virtuous and courageous enough to recognize the fecundity of ignorance, few have really addressed it with the verve and originality displayed in the contributions to this volume. I consider it a must-have for libraries, faculty, and graduate students.” — Eduardo Mendieta, editor of The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers

Contributors include Linda Martín Alcoff, Alison Bailey, Robert Bernasconi, Lorraine Code, Harvey Cormier, Stephanie Malia Fullerton, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Frank Margonis, Charles W. Mills, Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.), Elizabeth V. Spelman, Shannon Sullivan, Paul C. Taylor, and Nancy Tuana.

Abstract:
Cultural heritage, manifest in public monuments, plays an important role in education, providing tangible artefacts that chart the history of a society, its achievements, tragedies and horrors, contributing to human understanding and well-being. The educational impact is lifelong—everyone from schoolchildren to senior citizens visit and take in heritage sites. How heritage is to be approached, however, is a complex question, with conflicting narratives vying for prominence. Kingston, Ontario, where my university is situated, is the hometown of Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, whose ambition to unite the country sea-to-sea brought Canada into being. Today debate rages about how to understand Macdonald's legacy of colonialism, his actions against the Indigenous peoples, whose lands and children were taken from them, and against the families of Chinese workers, who built Canada's railway and were then impeded from making their homes in this country. In a climate of increasing awareness of racial oppression, exemplified particularly by the protests of Black Lives Matter, Kingston is in the grip of debate and demonstration, centering on calls for the removal of a prominent statue of Macdonald from a downtown park. This paper explores the problem of historic monuments to suggest that a focus on education can enable an understanding of heritage that seeks to provide the necessary conditions in which historic wrongs can be understood.