Philosophy Archives - Page 16 of 23

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What Makes Reasonable Force Reasonable?

Conceptions of Virtuous Rationality

August 15, 2017 • by Louis Colombo

In a recent essay published by Public Seminar, I argued that we should rethink the appeal to fear as a motive and justification for the use of force by police officers. Although I concluded that fear should not be seen as a legitimate defense of an officer’s decision to use force, my ...

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Defending Abortion Without “Rights”

A Review of Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason

August 14, 2017 • by Juniper Alcorn

In Foucault’s Futures, Penelope Deutscher stages critical discussions between Foucault and his critics and intellectual descendants, bringing reproduction into focus as an issue of biopolitics. The “future” of Foucault is contained in two questions: first, in what sense is reproduction present in Foucault’s work and how has it eluded or ...

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Substantive Populism

Against the devaluation of a term

August 11, 2017 • by Federico Finchelstein

In this article, Professor of History Federico Finchelstein argues that, despite its overuse and conceptual stretching, the category of populism is worth preserving if we want to understand our current political moment. The original Spanish version of this article can be found at Argentina’s newspaper Clarín. This piece was translated by ...

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“What the Foucault !?!” (The Fourth Edition of “Waiting for Foucault”)

On Structure and Event

August 10, 2017 • by Marshall Sahlins

Here's some intellectual diversion from the impending nuclear catastrophe: It's from the forthcoming "What the Foucault !?!"(The fourth edition of "Waiting for Foucault") Structure on one hand, agency and contingency on the other, are not opposed historical determinants in the sense that they exclude one another. On the contrary, each is ...

“What the Foucault !?!” (The Fourth Edition of “Waiting for Foucault”)

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Three Values of Anger

Chapter Five from ‘Sing the Rage’ by Sonali Chakravarti

August 9, 2017 • by Sonali Chakravarti

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Anger, like other emotions, is closely related to a cluster of affective predispositions, including resentment, sadness, and frustration. Insisting on a narrow definition of anger misses the way these emotions often overlap; conversely a broad interpretation of the emotions, writ large, lacks analytical specificity. Cutting through these ...

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We Are Swarming, Again.

Thoughts on William Connolly’s new book, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming

August 7, 2017 • by Richard Porteous

‘Swarming’ has a rich and complex history in political and philosophical literatures. That history percolates in political theorist William Connolly’s recent book Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming in which he proposes a ‘Politics of Swarming,’ and even resonates in his writing style. The question of ‘swarming’ intersects ...

Democracy

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Reflections on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Illiberal Democracy

August 2, 2017 • by András Bozóki

Since the end of the “transition paradigm”[i] which displayed an optimistic belief in political progress, analysts had to accept that the development from dictatorship to democracy could be halted or reversed. General expectations notwithstanding, the democratic upheaval of 1989-1991 did not end in turning all dictatorships into liberal democracies. Not ...

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

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Why Engage Public Anger

A reply to Chakravarti’s Introduction to ‘Sing the Rage’

August 1, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

“Sing the Rage” is a bold title for a bold book. It is no small provocation to thus entitle a book that argues for a more robust engagement with anger in public life in today’s democratic societies. The title is a further challenge for readers who recall the proem[1] to ...

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Use of Force

Law Enforcement in the United States

July 26, 2017 • by Louis Colombo

On July 6, 2016, at the age of 32, Philando Castile was shot dead in his car in what should have been a routine traffic stop. Although the officer involved in the shooting was charged with manslaughter and reckless discharge of a firearm, he was acquitted of all charges on ...

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Michael Taussig | The New School

2017 ICSI Public Lecture

July 15, 2017 • by Public Seminar

Sponsored by The New School for Social Research. The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public – a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of K. Anthony Appiah (Professor of Philosophy and Law, NYU), David Harvey (Professor of Anthropology and Geography, CUNY), ...

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The Politician as a Doctor

An Image of the Credibility Crisis in Chile

July 6, 2017 • by Beatriz Vega Elizondo

The presidential election in Chile is coming, and the candidate leading the polls is the businessman and former president Sebastián Piñera. He preceded the second government of the current president, the doctor Michelle Bachelet. If Piñera is elected once more, two periods of center-left governance -- presided over by a ...

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Leaderless Crowds

Reflections on the Power of Affects, from Gustave Le Bon to Frédéric Lordon

July 5, 2017 • by Léa Barbisan

In his book The Politics of Crowds, Christian Borch notes that even though “crowds and masses... seem to sustain themselves in the margins of contemporary sociological thinking... the mass media recurrently reports on new mass events, explicitly labeled thus, typically in the form of mass protests, mass disasters such as ...