Philosophy - Book Chapters
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Neoliberal and (post-)pandemic irruptions: Reconceptualising critical pedagogies for more-than-human crisis times(Routledge, 2024-05-14) Geerts, Evelien; Carstens, Delphi; Bustillos Morales, Jessie A.; Zarabadi, ShivaThis strong collaboration-rooted essay experiments with a so-called irruptive methodology to weave together the authors’ (post-)pandemic critical pedagogical experiences and praxes from within the contemporary neoliberal higher educational landscape. These experiences and praxes are mixed with irruptive philosophical snippets, conceptual passages, and narratives, each informing one another while addressing the many challenges attached to theorising and teaching in these more-than-human crisis times. Building on the work of critical pedagogical, posthumanist, and new materialist thinkers, the necessity of analysing these neoliberal (post-)pandemic times of crisis in their more-than-human complexity is then explained. This is done by sketching out a philosophical genealogy of ‘irruption’, presented here as a methodology and in the form of ‘neoliberal (post-)pandemic irruptions’. By reconceptualising these irruptions as events that challenge our teaching praxes but also simultaneously have the potential to reorientate us, this essay provides the reader with a situated critical pedagogy fit for more-than-human crisis times.Item Keeping human rights out of poverty(Edward Elgar, 2021-04-20) Bufacchi, Vittorio; Egan , Suzanne; Chadwick, AnnaIn Keeping Human Rights Out of Poverty Bufacchi defends the controversial view that human rights discourse may not be the best instrument for addressing global poverty. There are four main parts to this paper. Part 1 will give a general overview of some of the main arguments in favour of addressing the question of poverty in terms of a human rights discourse, while Parts 2 and 3 will argue that the link between poverty and human rights is at best superfluous and at worse counterproductive to the advancement of human rights or to the fight against poverty. Part 4 will consider, but ultimately reject, the view that it is necessary to describe poverty in terms of a human rights violation since doing so switches the debate from ethics to international law. In Poverty and the Rhetoric of Human Rights: A Reply to Bufacchi, Jesse Tomalty argues that Bufacchi does not succeed in undermining the rhetorical value of characterizing poverty as a human rights violation. This is because his arguments rest on an unduly narrow conception of human rights, according to which their normative role is limited to providing grounds for international intervention. According to Tomalty, the characterization of poverty as a human rights violation can be supported by a broader conception of human rights that better captures the wide array of normative roles they play in discourse and practice.Item Liberalism and structural injustice: when the solution becomes the problem(Edward Elgar, 2024-05-09) Bufacchi, Vittorio; Ivison, DuncanIf structural injustice is the problem, could liberalism be the solution? This paper argues that over the last few centuries liberalism tackled three manifestations of historical injustice (slavery; natural hierarchies; colonialism) by promoting the mantra of individual rights, but the unintended consequence of this philosophy has been to engender and legitimize even more enduring forms of structural injustice (exploitation; inequality; domination). Historical injustice has not gone away, it has simply learned to accommodate liberal orthodoxy. To tackle structural injustice, it may be necessary to look beyond liberalism.Item Deluded mindfulness(Taylor & Francis, 2023-12-22) Dockstader, Jason; Ferrarello, Susi; Hadjioannou, ChristosThis chapter looks at two Chinese traditions that can be described as offering a similar kind of unorthodox practice of mindfulness. Both the classical Daoism of the Zhuangzi and the medieval Buddhism of the Tiantai school develop an approach to mindfulness that presupposes unique metaphysical and epistemic views. In contemporary philosophical terms, by combining a strong many-one identity view in mereology, a novel form of existence monism in fundamental metaphysics, and an explosive trivialism in epistemology, both classical Daoism and Tiantai Buddhism develop an approach to mindfulness wherein each and every moment of experience or thought is accessed and regarded as creating, inherently including, and ultimately being identical to each and every other moment of experience. Every partially and locally coherent, yet wholly and globally incoherent, phenomenon is created by the discerning, deluded mind of everyday sentient beings, and it is by contemplating this deluded mind that one reaches similar soteriological goals of liberation and independence. In the Zhuangzi, this is found in the discussions of the ‘fasting of the mind’ and ‘sitting in forgetfulness,’ of matching Nature's endless production of momentary indexical distinctions, each of which contains the entirety of the Dao's infinite multiplicity. In Tiantai, this is found in discussions of the ‘contemplation of the mind’ and ‘contemplation of inherent inclusion,’ of the attempt to access ‘one moment of experience as three thousand worlds,’ with such ‘three thousand worlds’ being all phenomena created by the deluded mind, which is, namely, everything. The chapter, then, develops this novel form of mindfulness and calls it ‘deluded mindfulness.’ In the process, it aims to ascribe to deluded mindfulness the capacity to offer therapeutic benefits that follow from affirming the many contradictory understandings of mindfulness today.Item Envy, racial hatred, and self-deception(Routledge, 2023-04-13) Salice, Alessandro; Montes Sánchez, Alba; Montes Sánchez, Alba; Salice, AlessandroEnvy is an unpleasant, culturally vilified, and self-threatening emotion that, in many circumstances, tends to mask itself. In other words, due to various factors, envy often exerts some psychological pressure towards self-deception. A domain where this pressure plays an important and underappreciated role is the political and, more concretely, the realm of racism and identity-based discrimination. Despite historical, empirical, and anecdotal evidence indicating that envy can lead to racial hatred, the link between these two emotions, and the role that self-deception plays in this link, remains under-investigated and poorly understood. This chapter aims at remedying this situation by offering an account of the link between envy and racial hatred. After reviewing the evidence available in support of this emotional link, we elaborate on an account of envy we developed in a previous work. We then explain how, why, and under which circumstances envy can transmute into racial hatred by claiming that this transformation process qualifies as an “emotional mechanism”. We conclude by arguing that the envy-racial hatred emotional mechanism is based on self-deception and, as such, is an immature coping mechanism set in motion by the subject to avoid a negative sense of self.