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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Nathan NobisAbstract: Different strands of thought that arise out of political movements are often difficult to categorize and also often answer to many names. The 'difference approach' to feminism is discussed here, following Haslanger and Hackett. This approach is sometimes also called radical, cultural, or gynocentric feminism.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: The paper explores the ethics of post-menopausal motherhood by looking at the case of Adriana Iliescu, the oldest woman ever to have given birth (so far). To this end, I will approach the three most common objections brought against the mother and/or against the team of healthcare professionals who made it happen: the age of the mother, the fact that she is single, the appropriateness of her motivation and of that of the medical team.
Comment: This text presents a case study useful for a course on biomedical ethics, parenthood, or procreation. Further, the author considers a number of objections to postmenopausal motherhood and evaluates them for their ethical merit, providing a good introduction to questions of reproduction and parenting in non-traditional circumstances.
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Added by: Laura JimenezPublisher's Note: In Unsimple Truths, Sandra Mitchell argues that the long-standing scientific and philosophical deference to reductive explanations founded on simple universal laws, linear causal models, and predict-and-act strategies fails to accommodate the kinds of knowledge that many contemporary sciences are providing about the world. She advocates, instead, for a new understanding that represents the rich, variegated, interdependent fabric of many levels and kinds of explanation that are integrated with one another to ground effective prediction and action. Mitchell draws from diverse fields including psychiatry, social insect biology, and studies of climate change to defend "integrative pluralism" - a theory of scientific practices that makes sense of how many natural and social sciences represent the multi-level, multi-component, dynamic structures they study. She explains how we must, in light of the now-acknowledged complexity and contingency of biological and social systems, revise how we conceptualize the world, how we investigate the world, and how we act in the world.
Comment: The first five chapters, dealing with scientific methodology and epistemology could serve for undergraduate courses in general philosophy of science. The last chapter dedicated to integrative pluralism, is more specialized and thus more suitable for postgraduate courses.
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Added by: Sara PeppeIntroduction: From a logical point of view the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, can be described as a characteristic question of 'semantical closure' of a theory: to what extent can a consistent theory (in this case 2R) be closed with respect to the objects and the concepfs which are described and expressed in its metatheory?
Comment: This paper considers the measurement problem in Quantum Mechanics from a logical perspective. Previous and deep knowledge of logics and Quantum Mechanics' theories is vital.
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Added by: Simon FoktAbstract: This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of "care-knowing" and "care-based epistemology" emerge from construing caring (respectively) as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.
Comment: This text is best used in epistemology classes when discussing virtue reliablist and responsibilist approaches, and epistemic success in general. It will also be useful in philosophy of science classes: Dalmiya argues for radical changes in our approach to scientific research, including a redefinition of the epistemic and moral constraints which guide it.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Wayne RiggsAbstract: Makes a case for redirecting epistemology by basing it on a virtue approach and the method of care. According to virtue epistemology, what confers epistemic value are properties of the epistemic subject: his or her epistemic character, belief?forming habits, and cognitive dispositions. The method of care is a complex, interactive process of acquiring justified beliefs or knowledge, a process that integrates the subject into a social and ethical context. Starting out with a discussion of knowledge of other minds, the writer moves on to an examination of the role the knowing self plays within the kind of epistemology she wishes to advocate. One important element of that kind of epistemology is epistemic responsibility, understood not as epistemic duty fulfillment but instead as the endeavor to cultivate and reinforce attitudes that are deemed admirable in the epistemic community.
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
People often assume that everyone can be divided by sex/gender (that is, by physical and social characteristics having to do with maleness and femaleness) into two tidy categories: male and female. Careful thought, however, leads us to reject that simple ‘binary’ picture, since not all people fall precisely into one group or the other. But if we do not think of sex/gender in terms of those two categories, how else might we think of it? Here I consider four distinct models; each model correctly captures some features of sex/gender, and so each is appropriate in some contexts. But the first three models are inadequate when tough questions arise, like whether trans women should be admitted as students at a women’s college or when it is appropriate for intersex athletes to compete in women’s athletic events. (‘Trans’ refers to the wide range of people who have an atypical gender identity for someone of their birth-assigned sex, and ‘intersex’ refers to people whose bodies naturally develop with markedly different physical sex characteristics than are paradigmatic of either men or women.) Such questions of inclusion and exclusion matter enormously to the people whose lives are affected by them, but ordinary notions of sex/gender offer few answers. The fourth model I describe is especially designed to make those hard decisions easier by providing a process to clarify what matters.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Very accessible introduction to the problems with folk gender models. If one wants to emphasize the contrast between normative vs descriptive account of gender terms, the piece is naturally paired with Rory Collins' "Modeling gender as a multidimensional sorites paradox".
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Added by: Björn Freter, Contributed by: Dana TulodzieckiAbstract: I argue that collaborators do not need to reach broad agreement over the justification of a consensus claim. This is because maintaining a diversity of justifiers within a scientific collaboration has important epistemic value. I develop a view of collective justification that depends on the diversity of epistemic perspectives present in a group. I argue that a group can be collectively justified in asserting that P as long as the disagreement among collaborators over the reasons for P is itself justified. In conclusion, I make a case for multimethod collaborative research and work through an example in the social sciences.
Comment: Reading connecting philosophy of science and social epistemology; suitable for lower-level classes and up; good article for highlighting one way in which science is a social epistemic enterprise
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: Some political philosophers have recently argued that providing K-12 students with an adequate education suffices for social justice in education provided that the threshold of educational adequacy is properly understood. Others have argued that adequacy is insufficient for social justice. In this article I side with the latter group. I extend this debate to racial inequality in education by considering the controversial practice of paying students cash for grades to close the racial achievement gap. I then argue that framing the demand for racial justice in education solely in terms of educational adequacy leaves us unable to take issue with the cash for grades policy as a matter of principle. While this does not entail that educational adequacy is unimportant, it adds to the general case for why adequacy does not suffice for social justice.
Comment: This text is a good rejoinder to Anderson and Satz's arguments concerning the shift from a focus on providing an equal education to an adequate education. Though it could be read in absence of those texts, it requires a familiarity with the idea of sufficientarianism - and so should probably be read after Anderson's "Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective." It would have a place in a course concerning egalitarianism in education, racial justice, or education and democracy.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: A recent development in philosophical scholarship on reparations for black chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation is reliance upon social science in normative arguments for reparations. Although there are certainly positive things to be said in favor of an empirically informed normative argument for black reparations, given the depth of empirical disagreement about the causes of persistent racial inequalities, and the ethos of 'post-racial' America, the strongest normative argument for reparations may be one that goes through irrespective of how we ultimately explain the causes of racial inequalities. By illuminating the interplay between normative political philosophy and social scientific explanations of racial inequality in the prevailing corrective justice argument for black reparations, I shall explain why an alternative normative argument, which is not tethered to a particular empirical explanation of racial inequality, may be more appealing.
Comment: This text provides a clear overview and introduction to debates about reparations for decendents of African American slaves. It also surveys quite a bit of empirical data surrounding racial inequalities. It would fit well in a course that considered questions of social justice, racial inequality, or reparations.
Comment: An introduction to feminism, focusing on 'the Difference Approach' to feminism.