You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities which includes the first extended philosophical discussion of the works of Frederick Douglass, Cynthia Willett puts forward a novel theory of ethical subjectivity that is aimed to counter prevailing pathologies of sexist, racist Eurocentric culture. Weaving together accounts of the self drawn from African-American and European philosophies, psychoanalysis, slave narratives and sociology, Willett interrogates what Hegel locates as the core of the self: the desire for
Cynthia Willett brings together diverse insights from social psychology, classical and contemporary literature, and legal and justice theory to redefine the basis of the moral and legal person.Feminists, communitarians, and postmodern thinkers have made clear that classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual autonomy and excessive rationalism, is severely limited. Although she is sympathetic with the liberal view, Willett finds it necessary to go further. For her, attention to the social dimensions of the family and civil society is critical if issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality are to be taken seriously. Interdependency, not autonomy, is of increasing significance in an e...
Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy. Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.
"Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious offers a full-frontal approach to the very foundation of comedy and its profound political impact. Here Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett address the four major theories of humor—superiority, relief, incongruity, and social play—through the lens of feminist and game-changing comics Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Hari Kondabolu, and Tig Notaro."--
Comedy, from social ridicule to the unruly laughter of the carnival, provides effective tools for reinforcing social patterns of domination as well as weapons for emancipation. In Irony in the Age of Empire, Cynthia Willett asks: What could embody liberation better than laughter? Why do the oppressed laugh? What vision does the comic world prescribe? For Willett, the comic trumps standard liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies, affects, and intimate relationships, topics which are usually neglected by political philosophy. Willett's philosophical reflection on comedy issues a powerful challenge to standard conceptions of freedom by proposing a new kind of freedom that is unapologetically feminist, queer, and multiracial. This book provides a wide-ranging, original, thoughtful, and expansive discussion of citizenship, social manners, and political freedom in our world today.
This philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of racism brings together some of the most influential analytic philosophers writing on racism today. The introduction by Tamas Pataki outlines the historical and thematic development of conceptions of race and racism, and locates the following essays against the backdrop of contemporary reactions to that development. While the framework is primarily analytic, the volume also includes essays deeply informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist and social theory. The fourteen chapters in this collection address three interrelated questions: What is racism? What are the causes of racism? And what are the moral and political implications of racism? Although their approaches are wide ranging, the contributors to Racism in Mind broadly endorse a psychological-characterological approach to the understanding of many aspects of racism.
This book, covering all aspects of Hegel's logic, raises fundamental issues as well as particular problems of interpretation. It discusses whether a speculative logic is possible at all and whether Hegelian logic requires a metalogic or whether it can and ought to make an absolute beginning. It examines, conceptually and historically, the being-nothing dialectic, the relation of essence to show (Schein), and Hegel's treatment of the modal categories. It proposes radically different views of the role of the 'understanding' in Hegelian logic and a radically different view of the necessity underlying it. The book concludes with the argument that Hegel's dialectical logic can cope with a problem that Aristotle's could not. Essays on Hegel's Logic provides a welcome introduction to those interested in this central piece of Hegel's system, and it poses the question of whether, and how, the logic provides a closure to the system. In different ways, and with different degrees of explicitness, the book deals precisely with this issue.
First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This wide-ranging anthology of classic and newly-commissioned essays brings together the major theories of multiculturalism from a multiplicity of philosophical perspectives.
Political philosophy and feminist theory have rarely examined in detail how capitalism affects the lives of women. Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom take up opposing sides of the issue, debating whether capitalism is valuable as an ideal and whether as an actually existing economic system it is good for women. In a discussion covering a broad range of social and economic issues, including unequal pay, industrial reforms and sweatshops, they examine how these and other issues relate to women and how effectively to analyze what constitutes 'capitalism' and 'women's interests'. Each author also responds to the opposing arguments, providing a thorough debate of the topics covered. The resulting volume will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, political theory, women's studies and global affairs.