Author: Malley, Mary

Tracy Llanera: “Pragmatism, Language Games, and the Philippine Drug War”

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Check out Professor Tracy Llanera’s recent article in Philosophy and Global Affairs, “Pragmatism, Language Games, and the Philippine Drug War.”

This article explores the claim that how we talk can inspire how we reason and act. Contemporary research suggests that the words militant Christian leaders in the Philippines use shape how they rationalize President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Describing drug users as “sinners,” a trope in religious language, is particularly lethal. Using work on pragmatism and philosophy of language by Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and Lynne Tirrell, the author examines how the term “sinner” generates pernicious claims in the drug war. It explores how the use of the term inspires hermeneutic uptake, redirects discursive focus, and engenders certain social and political actions in the Philippines

Mitch Green: Editor-in-Chief of “Philosophia”

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We are pleased to announce that Professor Mitch Green will be the new Editor-in-Chief of Philosophia, a general philosophy journal that welcomes broadly accessible submissions on all topics of current philosophical interest. Philosophia will continue to commission Author-Meets-Critics symposia, and starting in 2023 will commission state-of-the art essays accessible to a wide audience. Due to the growing number of high-quality submissions, the journal has moved from publishing four issues per year to five. For more information, please visit Philosophia’s homepage.

Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala

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Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Editor

Roman & Littlefield, 2022

This is a collection of eleven chapters and an introduction that develop key arguments in decolonial feminism, particularly, the coloniality of gender, the critique of white and Eurocentric feminisms, the imbrication between gender, race, and colonialism, feminicides, and the coloniality of democracy and public institutions. The introduction addresses the path of decolonial feminism: from a new approach to understanding the relationship between gender as a category, race, and colonialism that combined U.S. Third World feminism and scholarship on coloniality and decoloniality to its exponential growth in the hands of activists and engaged scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, much of the literature on decolonial feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean remains unknown in the U.S. This anthology seeks to start remedying this problem with seven translations of work originally written in Spanish, and three essays originally written in English that address the fundamental concepts of decolonial feminism as well as its contributions to important contemporary political and intellectual debates.

Julian Schlöder: Editorial Board for Logique et Analyse

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Please join us in congratulating Julian Schlöder, who has joined the editorial board of Logique et Analyse.

Logique et Analyse is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes research in logic, philosophy of logic and/or mathematics, argumentation-theory, and analytical philosophy, broadly conceived.

Its first issue was published in 1958 by the National Center for Research in Logic, the Belgian Society for the promotion of logical research founded by Leo Apostel, Philippe Devaux, Joseph Dopp, Robert Feys, and Chaïm Perelman. The journal has been appearing ever since. Its presents editor are Jan Heylen and Peter Verdée, who have succeeded Jean Paul Van Bendegem.

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Check out graduate student Nimra Asif’s recent article in Synthese, “Minimal theory of mind – a Millikanian Approach.” Synthese is a philosophy journal focusing on contemporary issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and related fields.

***Abstract***

Minimal theory of mind (ToM) is presented in the theory of mind literature as a middle ground between full-blown ToM and mere behavior-reading. Minimal ToM seems to be a useful construct for studying and understanding the minds of nonhuman animals and infants. However, providing an account of minimal ToM on which minimal mindreading is significantly less demanding than full-blown mindreading yet more than just a behavior-reading process is a challenge. In this paper, I argue that to address this challenge, we need to depart from the traditional framework of mindreading in more radical ways than offered by current minimal theory of mind accounts. First, I explain the traditional view of mindreading on which mental state attribution is treated as essential for mindreading and analyze the general respects in which it makes mindreading demanding for the mindreader, such as requiring the mindreader to have concepts of mental states, engage in inferential reasoning processes involving mental states, and form meta-representations. Then I discuss and critically evaluate two accounts of minimal ToM and argue that these accounts either do not depart sufficiently from the demanding requirements of traditional mindreading or risk becoming re-descriptions of behavior-reading accounts. Finally, I present an alternative Millikanian account of minimal ToM that avoids this risk while departing more radically from the traditional view of mindreading by providing a way for minimal mindreaders to represent the mental states of others and respond to them without engaging in conceptual mental state attribution.

Tracy Llanera: “I Am An American Philosopher”

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Check out Assistant Professor Tracy Llanera's recent interview with the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), "I Am An American Philosopher."

*Excerpt*

The pragmatist tradition has no problem about being level-headed and getting muddy. There’s no bizarre or elitist hang-up in using (and re-forging) concepts from philosophy or other disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues or to promote social amelioration. As an approach, I’ve found pragmatism to be useful and liberating, whether I’m thinking about existential despair, or the words we use, or how hate festers in people.

Cody Turner: “‘Augmented Reality, Augmented Epistemology, and the Real-World Web”

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Check out graduate student Cody Turner's recent article in Philosophy and Technology, "Augmented Reality, Augmented Epistemology, and the Real-World Web."

*Abstract*

Augmented reality (AR) technologies function to ‘augment’ normal perception by superimposing virtual objects onto an agent’s visual field. The philosophy of augmented reality is a small but growing subfield within the philosophy of technology. Existing work in this subfield includes research on the phenomenology of augmented experiences, the metaphysics of virtual objects, and different ethical issues associated with AR systems, including (but not limited to) issues of privacy, property rights, ownership, trust, and informed consent. This paper addresses some epistemological issues posed by AR systems. I focus on a near-future version of AR technology called the Real-World Web, which promises to radically transform the nature of our relationship to digital information by mixing the virtual with the physical. I argue that the Real-World Web (RWW) threatens to exacerbate three existing epistemic problems in the digital age: the problem of digital distraction, the problem of digital deception, and the problem of digital divergence. The RWW is poised to present new versions of these problems in the form of what I call the augmented attention economy, augmented skepticism, and the problem of other augmented minds. The paper draws on a range of empirical research on AR and offers a phenomenological analysis of virtual objects as perceptual affordances to help ground and guide the speculative nature of the discussion. It also considers a few policy-based and designed-based proposals to mitigate the epistemic threats posed by AR technology.

Ruth Millikan: 2022 Sanders Lecture

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Emerita Professor Ruth Milliakn will deliver the 2022 Sanders Lecture at the 119th Meeting of the APA Central Division. The annual Sanders Lecture was established in 2013 to honor a distinguished scholar in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or epistemology who engages the analytic tradition. The paper is titled “40,000 Words in 14 Years” and is scheduled on Thursday, February 24, 10:00 a.m.–Noon.