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1. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
William Harwood

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Interrogating received knowledge is constitutive to any critical project, and recently there has been a wave of scholarship which argues for locating the origin of racist-thinking prior to modern Europe—even prior to the Common Era—without any real consideration of the potential dangers accompanying such a seismic redefinition. By expanding “racism” to include potentially any pre-modern xenophobic or ethnicist atrocity, even well-meaning scholarship dilutes the peculiar injustice of modern Europe’s most successful epistemological weapon. As a result, we lose any criteria to distinguish ubiquitous oppressive projects from specifically racist-projects of hegemony and domination. However laudable its intent, such scholarship falls prey to methodological, epistemological, and practical errors that hamstring the ameliorative impact of contemporary anti-racist work while ironically diminishing racism’s impact. For if every conflict is racist, then contemporary colorblindness is correct: if white supremacy isn’t particularly white, then racism is a distinction without a difference.

2. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Sanjay Lal

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In what follows, I question anger’s value for social activism and discourse. I focus on two little discussed aspects of anger. I argue that these aspects reflect problematic philosophical understandings that may be more serious than perhaps most events which are thought to give rise to anger. I will also argue that the functional value of anger is (at best) questionable given the role other, less damaging, human emotions are capable of playing in producing good outcomes. Additionally, I argue that one need not deny the functional value of anger altogether to reject its overall importance for motivating moral action.

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3. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Saraliza Anzaldúa

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Curanderismo is an Indigenous healing tradition in Chicane communities and throughout Mexico. Using such a lens, this paper analyzes the metaphysical nature of trauma as a splitting (susto) of the self and community. First, this paper explores the Indigenous philosophical principles that form the metaphysics of curanderismo. Second, three reactions to susto will be explored including what Gloria Anzaldua calls the Coyolxauhqui imperative, a re-membering of a split self towards healing. Through the second aim, the third aim of this paper is to lay out a road map of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in hopes that it will save more communities from total annihilation. That road involves integrating traumatic memory and history into a sense of self/community, weaving new relationships, and orienting a new self with a decolonized spirit.

4. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Jeremy Barris

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What distinguishes philosophy is its attention to reality and sense as such, or what is traditionally called being and essence. As a result, philosophy as a way of life is, most fundamentally, not directly a matter of doing one kind of thing rather than another outside the classroom but instead of how we live with respect to our being. Enacting our being in one way rather than another inflects whatever it is we do. Consequently, even if we only study philosophy in the conventional, apparently unlived way in the classroom, we are in active relation to our being and therefore fully living philosophy as a way of life.

5. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Mark S. Peacock

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Michael Sandel's critique of commodification is based on two pillars: corruption and fairness. After outlining these concepts, this paper scrutinizes Sandel's analysis of paid line-standing, focusing, in particular, on queues for congressional hearings in the United States. Sandel's corruption objection to commodifying places in queues for these hearings is unsatisfactory, and I develop an alternative account. According to that alternative, the corruption can be overcome by remedying the background conditions of inequality in society. This conclusion contradicts something that Sandel repeatedly claims, namely, that his corruption and fairness critiques of commodification are independent of each other. The corruption critique of paid line-standing for congressional hearings, I argue, has little normative force beyond that of his fairness critique.

6. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Anas Askar, Amin Asfari

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This paper argues that the nature of terrorism has remained unchanged despite perceived shifts. Over four decades of data collected in America show that right-wing violence has consistently posed the most pernicious threat. Despite media claims of objectivity and neutrality, we contend that law enforcement and the media targeted the Muslim community while being aware that the real threat emanates from the activities of right-wing groups. Employing Islamophobia as our conceptual framework and critical theory as our philosophical lens, we illuminate the mechanisms of exclusion by highlighting the Eurocentric historical roots of Islamophobia, with particular attention to the United States. Moreover, we expose those who benefit from raising the specter of a 'clash of civilization.' This study examines the disparities between the existing threat of Muslim-based violence and the terror threat of right-wing groups.

7. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Geoff Pfeifer, Taine Duncan

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The Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World maintains a commitment to pluralism in philosophical discourse by encouraging original, unconventional research with regard to contemporary concerns. Often this original and unconventional approach enables urgent and timely discussions to come to the fore. In the special section of this issue, Andrew Fiala’s Tyranny from Plato to Trump (2022) is engaged, not merely as an abstract author-meets-critics discussion, but as a provocative meditation on the present and a call to philosophers to respond to our political moment.

8. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Robert Metcalf

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9. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
David Jennings

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In Tyranny from Plato to Trump, Fiala mines the Western philosophical tradition to develop an understanding of the problem of tyranny and applies those insights to the age of Trump. Though I’m convinced by Fiala’s general account, in this paper I offer some critical comments, which I hope will invite him to further expand upon some of his views. In specific, I raise some questions about the nature of those who support tyrants and how to identify them. I also explore the problem of polarization and how it and foolishness might stand in the way of improving the educational system. Finally, I offer some reasons to think that people are naturally disposed to support tyrants and so that democracy is always at risk.

10. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
J. Jeremy Wisnewski

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These remarks consider Andrew Fiala’s Tyranny from Trump to Plato in the context of political apathy and climate pessimism. First, I raise the issue of whether or not some form of tyranny might be necessary in dealing with the crisis of climate change. Second, I express some skepticism about Fiala’s dual remedies of moral education (Ch 8) and constitutional wisdom (Ch 9) to face our present political challenges.

11. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Carolyn M. Cusick

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This essay follows Fiala’s hopefulness and his analysis of the coordination of a trio of actors needed for tyranny to succeed with a suggestion that preventing tyranny requires also a collective understanding, and education, of the coordination of citizens needed to create and sustain a democracy. Just as no one person can succeed at becoming a tyrant on their own, no one can achieve democracy on their own. Democracy is group work, conducted through epistemic interdependence, trust, and political friendships.

12. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Andrew Fiala

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13. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Michael Ball-Blakely Orcid-ID

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14. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Joshua M. Hall

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A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an interpretive duet between Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies.

15. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Jeremy Barris, Jeffrey C Ruff

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If we accept that at least some kinds of nonhuman animals are persons, a variety of paradoxes emerge in our ethical relations with them, involving apparently unavoidable disrespect of their personhood. We aim to show that these paradoxes are legitimate but can be illuminatingly resolved in the light of an adequate understanding of the nature of persons. Drawing on recent Western, Daoist, and Zen Buddhist thought, we argue that personhood is already paradoxical in the same way as these aspects of our ethical relations with nonhuman animals, and in fact is the source of their paradoxical character. In both contexts, depth and shallowness turn out to be internal to or crucial parts of each other, with logically anomalous consequences. We try to show that the character of this paradoxical relation between depth and shallowness in the nature of personhood involves a crucial inflection in the case of nonhuman animal persons that allows us to make sense of and resolve these ethical paradoxes.

16. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Noel Boulting

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By employing Peirce’s semiotics, Totalitarianism is distinguished indexically from forms of Dictatorship and Authoritarianism. The former can be cast, as Arendt argued, to initiate a project for world domination dispensing with any sense of Authoritarianism in forwarding some purely fictitious conception where violence is manifested in terror. Alternatively, distortion of intellectual activity may issue within Populism so that the rule of Demagogy emerges initiating Despotism or a form of Dictatorship – either Commissarial or Sovereign form – where lawless violence is sustained by secret police inducing fear but not terror. In the case of Authoritarianism induced iconically in a populace, violence may be tolerated accompanying either lawmaking or lawpreserving, both to be separated from Benjamin’s sense of pure violence. The latter – whether humanistically or spiritually understood – transcends both utilitarianism and sheer arbitrariness.

17. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Eleonora Montuschi Orcid-ID

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It has been urged that philosophers in the contemporary world should be able to engage with domains of practice and not just with each other. If that is the case, in what sense philosophy can become an ‘applied’ discipline, and with what consequences both for philosophy and for practice? As a preliminary I will rehearse some of the reasons why philosophical investigation is socially commendable. I will then show (sect. 1) how philosophy in so called knowledge societies should interact with science and the contexts where science is used. A suitably formulated idea of interdisciplinarity (sect.2) will suggest the necessary epistemic conditions to achieve this interaction. I will use two illustrations (sects. 4 and 5) from the specific field of the philosophy of science to point out the kinds of readjustments required by philosophical analysis not so much to apply but to ‘engage’ with practice (in a sense qualified in sect.3).

18. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Eoin O’Connell

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This paper argues that cool is a virtue in a specific context: that of black Americans living under a specific modality of white supremacy. But cool is not merely a coping mechanism. A historical analysis of the term shows that cool is being unimpressed by, and calm in the face of, white supremacy. This is made manifest in a style, the “cool pose,” the sophistication of which is captured in the jazz of Lester Young and Miles Davis. Thus, cool is both a virtue of character and a feature of black American aesthetics. But as a cultural phenomenon, it has been appropriated by white American culture.

19. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Sam Badger

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20. Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Eddy Souffrant

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