This musing details my approach to decolonising the syllabus for my course "Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science." It describes the motivation behind the changes I made, what happened, and future directions for this endeavour.
Ancient sources label Xanthippe a "difficult" woman-shrewish, emotional, and hostile to philosophy. While some recent feminist scholars have reinterpreted these sources as being more sympathetic, most stop short of asking about her philosophical life and commitments, assuming that the evidence is simply too sparse to draw any conclusions. This paper argues against this assumption. It establishes that there is a lesser-known ancient tradition, possibly beginning in the works of the ancient Athenian Socratic acolytes and continuing into the fictitious epistolary of the Imperial Greek period, according to which Xanthippe is a philosophical participant, living by philosophical principles, and perhaps even conserving Socratic works after his death. This tradition also suggests that she may have held her own philosophical views which merit future consideration, as she is sometimes associated with topics like moral education, philosophical community, and material well-being.
Embodiment is a particularly difficult dimension of experience to capture for transgender individuals, particularly individuals who identify as nonbinary. Accounts of embodiment in both philosophy and psychology often fail to capture the layers of perplexity which nonbinary individuals experience when attempting to understand the relationship between the lived body and social perceptions of the body. In reading Merleau-Ponty's late work in The visible and the invisible, particularly the much-discussed notion of the chiasm, I attempt to work toward a potential remedy for phenomenology's difficulty accounting for this particular dimension of experience. Drawing extensively on Megan Burke's (2022) discussion of the notion of cis sense, I elaborate the implications of the ontological principle of the chiasm in relation to the nonbinary experience of the body. Through a close reading of the implications of Merleau-Ponty's particular understanding of "invisibility," I conclude that the application of the ontological principle of the chiasm to the nonbinary experience of the body is fruitful conceptually, as it offers a powerful language through which to counter normative and reifying ways of accounting for the body. Ultimately, a chiasmatic account presents a dynamic body which emerges from preeminent first-person authority over embodiment.
Feminist, disability, and other theorists have long expressed concerns about the seeming paternalism implicit in care. In Learning from my daughter, Eva Kittay aims to put these concerns to rest. Exploring more fully than previous care theorists the final phase of caregiving, she argues that good care requires "completion," by which she means explicit or implicit subjective endorsement by the care receiver of the goods or benefits the caregiver provides them. Insofar as subjective endorsement is necessary for good care, good care by definition cannot be paternalistic. This article argues, however, that Kittay's attempt to distinguish care from paternalism is mired in problems. It does not provide a reliable standard for distinguishing good care from bad or even effective protection against paternalistic abuse. In place of Kittay's completion standard, I defend an objective standard of good care based on Stephen Darwall's theory of rational care but amended to include insights from care theorists about the importance of attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect in the practice of good care. Overall, the article clarifies the standards of good care with particular attention to the danger of paternalism implicit in it.
This paper critically engages with Marx's vision of unalienated production, understood as a form of production that is motivated by satisfying another's needs, through the lenses of feminist and critical race theory. It focuses on the practice of unpaid caregiving and argues that there exists a productive tension at the heart of this practice: unpaid caregiving harbours the potential to constitute unalienated activity in Marx's sense. The realization of this potential is, however, systematically undermined in dominant caregiving practices due to oppressive social meanings that are embedded in the political economy of capitalism. Social meanings, in addition to markets, present an obstacle to unalienated relations, yet one that tends to be overlooked by Marx and Marxist theorists of alienation. Understanding how dominant caregiving practices undermine the possibility for unalienated activity provides insights into the concrete conditions for realizing unalienated activity.
