Sam Woolfe asks if pessimism is a proper response to life or a symptom of depression.

The criminologist accused of cooking the books. How an anonymous whistle-blower and a police investigation pit a professor against his mentor

2019.09.18 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Emmanuel Renault, The Experience of Injustice: A Theory of Recognition, Richard A. Lynch (tr.), Columbia University Press, 2019, 272pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231177061. Reviewed by Gabriel Gottlieb, Xavier University Emmanuel Renault’s book offers a critical theory of justice grounded in the concept of recognition. His model serves as an alternative to the liberal models of justice found in Rawls and Habermas. Originally published in French in 2004, this English translation (by Richard A. Lynch) of Renault’s book should be welcomed by political philosophers working on theories of justice, identity politics, social movements, the limits of liberalism, and critical theory more generally. For philosophers working on the politics of recognition, the book is essential reading. Building on the Hegelian-inspired theory of recognition articulated by Axel Honneth in The Struggle of Recognition, Renault aims to reorient Honneth’s model of recognition around “the normative content of negative social experiences that can lead to... Read More

by Christopher B. Riendeau This summer, a mother posted on Facebook bemoaning the childless visitors of Disney World. “DW is for CHILDREN!!!!” she wrote. “People ... Read more...

Helen Frowe, professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and director of the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, has won the 2019 Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy. The prize is awarded by the Marc Sanders Foundation and is based on a competition of essays of “original research on central issues in political or social philosophy, such as moral issues relating to the state or the justification of force, authority, obligation, justice, freedom, rights, exploitation, oppression, etc.” It includes $5,000 and publication in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Professor Frowe won the prize for her essay, “The Duty to Save and the Duty to Minimise Harm.” Here’s the abstract: This paper defends the Limited Use View of our duties to save. This view holds that a claim to be saved is a claim to make use of another person (and her resources) for one’s own sake. But we have only limited claims to make use of others and their resources. We are not entitled to make use of others when doing so is either unreasonably costly for them or conflicts with their duties to others. Hence, our claims to be saved are limited. By the same token, our duties to save are also limited. We need not save when doing so is unreasonably costly for us or conflicts with our duties to others, since others have no claim to make use of us when doing so is unreasonably costly for us or conflicts with our duties to others. One upshot of the Limited Use View is that it can sometimes be permissible to defensively harm for one’s own sake, or for the sake of special others, even though it would be impermissible to do so for the sake of a stranger. There’s more information about the prize, as well as a list of previous winners, here. The post Frowe Wins Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy appeared first on Daily Nous.

Marymount Manhattan College is looking to hire someone with expertise in both public philosophy and prison education, neither of which have been listed as areas of specialization in a philosophy job ad before, to my knowledge.  (Correct me if I’m wrong about that.) Lamont Thergood, “The Day” The job is a two-to-three year visiting joint appointment as a fellow at the College’s Geraldine A. Ferraro Institute for Breakthrough Civic Leadership and its Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. The chief responsibilities of the position include teaching courses on public philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and related topics, teaching courses in the school’s prison education programs, developing and overseeing the programs, providing professional development opportunities for other faculty teaching in them, and helping the department revise its philosophy major to have a focus on public philosophy. You can check out the ad here. (via Thi Nguyen) The post New AOS: Public Philosophy & Prison Education appeared first on Daily Nous.

Semicolons: Melville was promiscuous; Vonnegut swore them off as "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Where do you stand?

[Revised entry by Martine Nida-Rümelin and Donnchadh O Conaill on September 23, 2019. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism....

This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin. ... Read more...

[Revised entry by Dan Haybron on September 23, 2019. Changes to: Bibliography] There are roughly two philosophical literatures on "happiness," each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses 'happiness' as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to 'depression' or 'tranquility'. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what...