Abstract:

A Jew born in Tunisia, Memmi (1920–2020) rose to fame with The Colonizer and The Colonized, prefaced by Sartre. Educated in Tunisia, Algeria and France, he settled in Paris, where he wrote novels and essays alike. His main topics include colonialism, the Jewish condition and Tunisia.
An early theorist of decolonization, he used a sociological approach, getting to psycho-sociologist, working through portraits—the orignal title of the book is Portrait of the Colonized, Preceded by Portrait of the Colonizer—trying to describe "rendings of the spirit" as "introjections of social conflicts", according to Sartre in his preface.
Published in 1957, this work aims to shows the interweaving of the colonizer's and the colonized's mind, clearly sketched out by the binary structure of the essay.
Memmi starts with the economical aspect of colonization, describing how the fundamental inequality of colonization gives the colonizer a much more favorable material situation. One of his key thesis is the interdependence of the colonizer and of the colonized, trying to go beyond Marxism and psychoanalysis. He characterizes the consciousness of the colonizer through three discoveries: "profit, privilege, and usurpation". To this duality, he adds several third parties: nationals of other countries, assimilated minorities, Jews, colonized participating in the colonial administration, etc, giving a vivid account of the entanglement between both subjectivity and objective structures, and colonizer and colonized.

Abstract:

Questioning Aristotle's Idea

In Categories and On Interpretation, Aristotle develops his view on the relation between language and the real world. However, there exist in Japanese words conflicting with the idea. This paper argues that each of the four formal classes of lexically meaningful elements of Japanese defined on their combinability with the nominative case and the tense markers consistently corresponds to the divisions of reality, and shows that the relation of words to the world cannot be predicted from their use in a sentence. Under this analysis, Aristotle's idea, which is based on the “omoma-rhema” distinction, from which the universal “noun-verb” distinction originates, is thrown into a question

Abstract:

When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of “one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century” (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. This book discusses our responsibilities to address “structural” injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we are not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. The book argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which it calls the “social connection” model. The book develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live.

Abstract:
As a species, we have long been both settled and mobile, with some of us rooted in place and others more migratory. Mobility is not a new feature of human life; however, contemporary forms of mobility diminish geographical, cultural, and ecological rootedness and bring together people with many diverse ways of life. This cultural interchange offers both challenges and opportunities: challenges as people encounter unfamiliar contexts and navigate values and perspectives that differ radically from their own; and opportunities as new perspectives can generate new insights and possibilities for living well together. Along with this cultural exchange, there are significant pressures to reach common moral understanding on issues such as climate change, migration, humanitarian intervention, and responses to poverty. Global discourse is no longer governed exclusively by international political realism, and moral reasons are frequently invoked in international debates. In light of these contexts, many believe that we should view the world as a single moral community—we should be cosmopolitans—but precisely what this entails remains subject to debate. Do the Confucian Analects and the early Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, offer resources relevant to the contexts just described and to understanding what forms contemporary cosmopolitanism might take? The first, theoretical/textual portion of this chapter answers affirmatively, showing how insights can be gleaned from both traditions and how these insights complement one another. The Analects illustrates the importance of certain forms of rootedness and con nection for moral personhood, suggesting that cosmopolitanism needs to make space for sustained relations and take seriously the significance of culture. On the other hand, the Zhuangzi cautions against fixating too strongly on a single outlook and casts doubt on claims of a single, uniquely correct moral point of view. The second part of the chapter considers the relevance of these perspec tives for contemporary debates over cosmopolitanism and human rights. There we critique approaches that place too much weight on a universal moral minimum and show how both Confucian and Zhuangian insights may inform a genuinely multicultural cosmopolitanism.

Abstract:

This book argues that the major traditions in the philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals.

Philosophers of language have focused primarily on highly idealized linguistic contexts in which cooperative agents are working toward the shared goal of gaining information about the world. This approach abstracts away from important issues like power, ideology, social position, and diversity of goals which are crucial to explaining linguistic phenomena both at the semantic and pragmatic levels. This book begins by examining the work of some of the pioneers of this tradition—primarily David Lewis, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker. The author shows that various problems have their source in idealizations made at the foundational level of linguistic theory and proposes to rebuild from the ground-up. She presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language which retains the major insights of traditional frameworks while rejecting the social idealizations that guide them. Then, she explores the social and political applications of her account to issues such as dog whistling, propaganda, racist speech, silencing, and manipulation.

Abstract:

In a recent article, “Logical Consequence and Natural Language”, Michael Glanzberg claims that there is no relation of logical consequence in natural language (2015). The present paper counters that claim. I shall discuss Glanzberg’s arguments and show why they don’t hold. I further show how Glanzberg’s claims may be used to rather support the existence of logical consequence in natural language.

Abstract:
Inspired by the work and life of Dorothy Wrinch, 1894-1976. The proceedings of a symposium held at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, September 28-30, 1977 and selected papers of Dorothy Wrinch, from the Sophia Smith Collection.

Abstract:
The object of this paper is the study, in some of its aspects, of the structure of scientific inquiry. The subject is a large one and covers the major part of the field of scientific methodology. We shall confine our attention more particularly to the consideration of those problems of scientific structure which occur in the case of more advanced sciences and merely outline the corresponding problems which occur primarily in sciences in the more elementary stage

Abstract:

Aristotle is generally credited with the invention of logic. More than two thousand years ago, he noticed that good, persuasive arguments have certain kinds of shapes, or structures. Logic was born when he began to study those structures, which he called syllogisms, identifying underlying patterns of ordinary human reasoning and then devising simple methods which can be used to determine whether someone is reasoning correctly. Aristotle was aware that this was a momentous discovery, and he himself thought that all scientific reasoning could be reduced to syllogistic arguments. There are hints that Aristotle saw his syllogistic logic as providing useful practice for participants in ancient debating contests, contests which he himself would have encountered as a student in Plato’s Academy. There are also hints that Aristotle might have envisioned his syllogistic logic as providing a way to catalogue facts about science. But Aristotle never fleshes out any such details. His Prior Analytics, the text in which he presents his syllogistic, focuses on the mechanics of the syllogistic far more than on its interpretation, and in fact the comparative lack of interpretive detail has sometimes led scholars to suppose that what we have today of Aristotle’s logic is his own sometimes scrappy lecture notes or his students’ notes, and not a polished, finished work. But in the end these are of course only guesses. In modern times, the main scholarly interest in Aristotle’s ancient logic has focused increasingly on the proper interpretation of the mechanical methods which Aristotle invented and on their relation to his wider philosophy.

Abstract:
This book is a collection of papers by Ruth Barcan Marcus, covering much ground in the development of her thought, and spanning from 1961 to 1990. Many of the papers deal with logical, semantic, metaphysical, and epistemological issues in intensional logic, and in particular, modalities. Some important themes that run through these papers are extensionality, the necessity of identity, the directly referential conception of proper names as “tags,” essentialism, substitutional quantification, and possibilia and possible worlds. What emerges from them is a robust defense of quantified modal logic in the light of a host of objections, particularly from Quine. Modalities also includes two papers on belief, which have consequences for epistemic logic and more widely for theories of rationality; two papers on ethical issues, which have consequences for deontic logic and practical reasoning; and finally, two papers on historical figures, Spinoza and Russell, dealing with the ontological proof of God's existence, and the nature of particularity, identity, and individuation, respectively.