Tiana-Marie Blassingale: Jeezy’s Lessons from Adversity

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Please check out an excerpt from Philosophy Graduate Student Tiana-Marie Blassingale’s new review essay, “Jeezy’s Lessons from Adversity”:

On the surface, it seems like Adversity for Sale is a collection of short stories about a young Black man as he navigates his way through the street life into a position of an established entrepreneur who is capable of providing generational wealth for his family by any means. However, seen through a philosophical lens, the book highlights a new perspective on liberatory virtues and vices. It’s a curation of epistemology, learned through lived experiences, not only by Jeezy, but also by many others in the book and the hood, more generally speaking. The book provides a glimpse into a rich body of knowledge, which could be referred to as “Hood Philosophy,” otherwise known as “street smarts” or “street knowledge.”

You can read the full essay on the Blog of the APA here.

Congratulations, Tiana-Marie!

Thomas Meagher: Myisha Cherry’s Failures of Forgiveness Review

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Check out Thomas Meagher’s (PhD 2018) newest review essay: “Forgiveness, Obligation, and Cultures of Domination: A Review of Myisha Cherry’s Failures of Forgiveness”.

Below is an excerpt of the article, which you can read in full on the Blog of the APA here.

This diagnosis Cherry relates largely in the form of a discussion of the commonplace or “narrow” view of forgiveness. Cherry characterizes the common view as one in which forgiveness is, at heart, a means of letting go of anger. On such a view, the purpose or telos of forgiving must be to unburden the forgiver of emotions directed toward wrongdoers. Cherry shows, though, that this is an overly narrow conception of the emotional correlates of those contexts in which forgiveness is an option. 

Congrats, Thomas!

Perceptual Content

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William G. Lycan, Author

Oxford University Press, 2024

Perceptual Content is the first book to discuss and compare the representational characters of all the traditional "five senses". It has three main topics or concerns.

  1. The diversity of the senses: though Lycan maintains as a working assumption that all perception represents, the similarity between sense modalities ends there. The senses' respective representational modes, styles and structures -- not just their mechanisms -- differ very strongly from each other.
  2. The Layering thesis: Lycan argues that a single sensory representation usually has more than one content, the contents systematically related to each other by a priority or dependence relation. More specifically, a perceptual state may represent one object or property by representing a more primitive or less ambitious one; he calls this the "layering" of content. For example, by hearing a sound sequence involving such-and-such volumes and timbres, you hear a voice speaking, and by hearing the voice, you hear words in a language. In some modalities layering works unexpectedly: nearly all tactile representation derives from representation of conditions of or in the subject's own skin, meaning that touch represents, e.g., the texture of a physical object by, and only by, representing stress within the skin; and even among the skin conditions, some are represented only by representing more primitive ones.
  3. Aspect perception: despite Wittgenstein's famous discussion of "seeing as" in a late section of Philosophical Investigations, little has been written on perceiving-as. Besides its intrinsic interest -- even popular appeal, what with joke ambiguous figures such as the duck-rabbit and the old/young woman -- it remains especially mysterious. Nearly all work on it has concerned vision only. But it is crucial for understanding auditory representation, which is one thing that distinguishes hearing from the other senses. Further, the auditory case severely damages what Lycan and others had thought was the best approach to understanding aspect perception, in terms of attention.

Hady Ba and Gregory Doukas: Academy of Advanced African Studies

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Congratulations to visiting research fellow Hady Ba and part-time faculty member Gregory Doukas on being rewarded with a fellowship at the Academy of Advanced African Studies in Bayreuth, Germany. This fellowship is for next year, 2025.

 

Ba and Doukas are also co-authors of a book in African philosophy and decolonial theory; in which an article about their work will be published in Philosophy and Global Affairs this summer.

Mitch Green: Volume 51 of Philosophia

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Congratulations to Professor Mitch Green on successfully completing Volume 51 of Philosophia as Editor-in-Chief. Furthermore, he has expanded the journal’s reach to a global audience by introducing the new subtitle: A Global Journal Of Philosophy.

You can find more information on the journal, it’s newest volume and issues, here.

Well wishes to you and your team, Mitch!

Tracy Llanera: Featured in The Daily Campus

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Congratulations to Assistant Professor Tracy Llanera on being featured in The Daily Campus! The article features Dr. Llanera’s presentation, “The Misfits of Extremism: Brides, Moms, and Daughters,” and discusses the premise of her upcoming book that is currently in progress.

 

“This book interrogates the role, value, and agency of marginal actors in white supremacist and Islamic terror movements,” Llanera stated. “While becoming extremists may temporarily enhance their agency and feelings of importance and belonging, I argue that the empowerment of marginal actors is conditional, pernicious and often lethal.”

 

You can read the rest of the article here.