Social Ontology is Ontology

Social ontology is ontology. This might seem too much a truism to be worth stating, but its consequences are far-reaching. On the one hand, its methodology is completely on a par with other fields of ontology, like the ontology of abstract objects, midsize objects, the mind, etc. The consensual methodology in these fields is to […]

Academic Gatekeeping Is Killing Me

“In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility” (bell hooks, Teaching […]

Philosophy Has a Body-shaming Problem

1. “Diet Culture is Unhealthy. It’s Also Immoral.” In a recent New York Times article, Kate Manne pointed out that philosophy has a body-shaming problem. She focused on fat-shaming, but one can extend her arguments to disability-shaming. Just as fat bodies are stigmatized, disciplined, and marginalized in philosophy, so are disabled bodies. Indeed, many of Manne’s claims […]

A Tale of Two Resiliences: The Emergence of Neoliberal Resilience and Radical Resilience

1. Neoliberal Resilience: A Genealogy Resilience is a popular but controversial and undertheorized concept. The best-known modern conceptualization of resilience emerged from child psychiatry and developmental psychology (John Bowlby’s 1960s attachment studies), but came to involve social psychology, counseling, clinical psychology, epidemiology, and other sciences (Vernon 2004). Still, there is no consensus on the definition […]

A gradualist approach to forgiveness and grudges

The goal:To reconcile the following claims in tension:Forgiveness must be granted, not earned (Jankélévitch, Calhoun)Unconditional forgiveness entails condonation (Murphy, Griswold) Premises:Forgiveness involves the overcoming or extinction of reactive attitudes of sanction (Cazares 2020)Reactive attitudes of sanction [RAS] come in degrees.How much RAS an agent is justified to hold is directly proportional to the severity of […]

Frances Kissling on the Ethics of Philantropical Impact

It is good to ask whether your effort of social change have actually had any impact, i.e., whether some particular action or strategy are effective or we are just waisting our resources. We also want to avoid scam-philanthropical organisations which, unfortunately, are common enough. 

La crítica filosófica de Guillermo Hurtado al malinchismo

Hurtado toma de Foucault la noción de dispositivo para dar cuenta del malinchismo. Tal y como yo lo entiendo, un dispositivo Foucoultiano es una serie de mecanismos que opera sobre lo simbólico para generar y/o mantener un orden de dominio por medio del control de aspectos de nuestra subjetividad. Dar el diagnóstico de un diapositivo implica, […]

Children as an Oppressed Class

I am grateful for comments from Adam Kobler (a law professor) and Martine Shelley-Piccinini (an 11-year-old). Skip to the bottom for a summary of the main points, written for a general audience.  In this post, I’m going to argue that children are an oppressed class, in a position similar to 20th Century housewives, working mothers, and […]