Signs and languages are very useful tools for social coordination and thus play a central role in most, if not all, social practices, but I doubt they are actually necessary to achieve meaningful social interaction or at least interactions that generate normative expectations, and not just patterns of actions and re-actions. Consider the example of […]
CFP: Critical Social Ontology Workshop, Online, Mar. 25-26, 2023 (deadline: Mar. 1, 2023)
The Critical Social Ontology Workshop is an interdisciplinary venue for radical thinking about the metaphysics of irreducibly social phenomena. Core members of CSOW are Ruth Groff (Coordinator), Sally Haslanger, Tony Lawson, Doug Porpora, Vanessa Wills and Charlotte Witt. We invite paper proposals for the 2023 meeting of the Workshop, to be held via Zoom due […]
Should we stop talking of race, gender, etc.?
Does rejecting the metaphysical reality of races committees us to “resist a policy of providing support to black-owned businesses, or any other race-based prioritization”, presumably, because we would be committed to reject as false the race-talk behind such measures.
The Ethics of Praise
Thanks to the LATAM Free Will Project I just had he chance to attend a very interesting workshop on The Ethics of Praise. It started with a talk by Andrea Vial on the amazing work she has been doing on the relation between praise and stereotypes. In particular, she gave empirical evidence that, for example, […]
Open Questions in Social Ontology
Hsiang-Yun Chen and Sally Haslanger have just edited an special issue on Social Meaning and Reality for the EurAmerica Journal and it features an article by yours truly. This is how they summarize it on their introduction to the special issue: Just as there is a large variety of social categories that an individual can […]
What’s Ahead: Against Natural(izing) Disability
Much of my writing, teaching, service, and activism in philosophy has been designed to undermine a cluster of assumptions about the relation between nature and nurture, that is, a cluster of assumptions about the relation between biology and society, assumptions that remain embedded in philosophical discourses, variously naturalizing disability, gender, race, and other apparatuses of […]
Constructing Social Hierarchy II, MIT, Dec. 6, 2019
Program: 9:00 Morning Tea 9:30: Susanna Siegel (Harvard), Are There Norms of Attention? 1100: Break 11:30: Elisabeth Camp and Carolina Flores (Rutgers), Framing Our Way to Resistance 1:00 Lunch 2:00: Greg Rastell (Melbourne), Generic: Inference and Accommodation 3:30 Break 4:00: Jason Stanley (Yale), The Problem of Ignorance in the Age of Information 5:30: Reception Catered […]
Weinberg and Barnes on Ableist Language
Last week, Justin Weinberg put two additional posts on Daily Nous that make liberal use of ableist language. Elizabeth Barnes gave him permission to do so. In a manner of speaking. For only days before Weinberg put these ableist posts on his blog, he published an interview with Barnes in which she speaks disparagingly about […]
CFP: Ethnobiology – Perspectives from History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science (deadline: Jul. 20, 2019)
Issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, David Ludwig and Francisco Vergara-Silva (eds.) Ethnobiology is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of biological and social sciences that studies knowledge systems and practices of Indigenous, traditional, and other local communities. The complexity of biological expertise beyond academia raises both theoretical and […]
Dialogues on Disability With Shelley Tremain
Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the fourth-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range […]
BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 