A live issue in anthropology and development studies, humanism is not typically addressed by analytic philosophers. Arguing for humanism as a view about truths, Humanism and Embodiment insists that disembodied reason, not religion, should be the target of secularists promoting freedom of enquiry and human community.Susan Babbitt's original study presents humanism as a meta-ethical view, paralleling naturalistic realism in recent analytic epistemology and philosophy of scie...

This book considers the nature and exercise of moral imagination in situations in which our ability to act and choose meaningfully is limited by unarticulated expectations. Moral imagination is a cognitive attitude, in which we regard propositions as true. But it also involves orientation. In moral imagination, we regard propositions as true in order to make something else true, and we act and interpret as if it were true. The demand for explanatory unity in such situations - what I call '...

The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy functions as a textual site where white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Within this text, white women philosophers critique the field of philosophy for its complicity with whiteness as a structure of power, as normative, and as hegemonic. In this way, the authority...

The Buddha was what today is called an empirical philosopher, taking his philosophy from careful study of the empirical world, and rejecting “high flown” philosophies. As philosophy of existence, his view overlaps with Marx in his most interesting form, which is not the way Marx is typically understood. Marx was reduced to economics while the Buddha was reduced to religion. Many shared his view, including Dostoevsky, Proust, and Victor Hugo. Death is present in such views. But they are not...

The modern university can trace its roots to Kant's call for enlightened self-determination, with education aiming to produce an informed and responsible body of citizens. As the university evolved, specialized areas of investigation emerged, enabling ever more precise research and increasingly nuanced arguments. In recent decades, however, challenges to the hegemony of disciplines have arisen, partly in response to a perceived need for the university to focus greater energy on its public ...

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approa...

This unique, timely book of original essays sets the stage for a new materialist feminist debate on the analysis, ethics and politics of love. The contributors raise questions about social power and domination, situating their research in a materialist feminist perspective that investigates love historically, in order to understand changing ideologies, representations and practices. The essays range from studies of particular representations and examples of love - feminist translation, mas...

In an important new book, Laura Gillman argues that in this post-identity politics era, identities can still yield reliable knowledge. Focusing on womanist and mestiza theoretical writings, literary texts, and popular cultural representations, Gillman advances a comparative theoretical model of identity and consciousness that foregrounds a naturalist-realist account. She demonstrates that reason and knowledge originate from diverse human practices enacted in the social and natural world an...

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice. It critically analyzes basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, including impartiality, formal equality, and the unitary moral subjectivity. The starting point for her critique is the experience and concerns of the new social movements about decision making, cultural expression, and division of labor--that were created by marginal a...

María Lugones, one of the premiere figures in feminist philosophy, has at last collected some of her most famous essays, as well as some lesser-known gems, into her first book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes. A deeply original essayist, Lugones writes from her own perspective as an inhabitant of a number of different "worlds."Born in Argentina but living for a number of years in the United States, she sees herself as neither quite a U.S. citizen, nor quite an Argentine. An activ...

Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal--the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of s...

Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars-working both within and beyond the United States-to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguist...