All posts tagged: martina valković

Atmospheres of Parenthood | Blog of the APA

Atmospheres of Parenthood | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Anyone who has visited the home of parents with a newborn baby can recognize from the outset a specific kind of atmosphere that seems to fill the space. It is often an atmosphere of anticipation, exhilaration, chaos, and apprehension that is tangible and felt “in the air.” The parents themselves seem to be expressions of the atmosphere, weighed down by fatigue if not anxiety but simultaneously awestruck by their new arrival. Both parents and visitors can perceive and feel the atmosphere even if both parties interpret the phenomenon differently. Such experiences raise the question of what kind of a phenomenon parenthood is. From a historical perspective, this question seems straightforward. Traditionally, parenthood has tended to refer to biological, legal, and moral categories. While these categories are vital to the concept of parenthood, parenthood is nevertheless irreducible to them. We can also think of parenthood as a “transformative experience,” one that cannot be fully grasped in advance, because becoming a parent constitutes a new kind of self. But parenthood involves more than the transformation of one’s …

2022 Central Division Dewey Lecture: The Question Is How to Live

2022 Central Division Dewey Lecture: The Question Is How to Live

Published by Jenni Sidey

Below is the audio recording of Allan Gibbard’s John Dewey Lecture, “The Question Is How to Live,” given at the 2022 Central Division Meeting. The full text is available on the APA website (member sign-in is required) as well as on JSTOR. The audio of the lecture is available here: “The Question Is How to Live” by Allan Gibbard Allan Gibbard is Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1977 until 2016. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, he held positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Chicago. He received his PhD at Harvard University. His fields of study include ethics, social choice theory, decision theory, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. His publications include Meaning and Normativity (Oxford University Press, 2012), Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Thinking How to Live (Harvard University Press, 2003), as well as many articles and book chapters. Gibbard served as president of the APA Central Division from 2001 …

The Ethics of Refugee Protection

The Ethics of Refugee Protection

Published by Jenni Sidey

Around 42.5 million refugees worldwide have been forced to flee their own states and are unable to return because of severe threats to their lives, human rights, or basic needs. Having fled these threats, the vast majority have by no means found protection. Instead, most refugees live either in squalid refugee camps or face destitution in urban areas in regions close to their own states in the Global South. A small minority risk their lives on journeys to reach asylum in the Global North; many thousands lose them. How should states in the Global North (the affluent liberal democracies including the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and European states) respond to this situation? Some philosophers argue these states should open their borders to accept as many refugees as possible until the point of societal collapse. Other philosophers argue states need not admit a single refugee. Some states have responded with expansive welcome schemes accepting over one million. Other states have erected concrete walls and barbed wire fences. Some citizens march the streets with signs reading “refugees …

Why Casting Isn’t Coming Out: Heated Rivalry and Sexual Orientation

Why Casting Isn’t Coming Out: Heated Rivalry and Sexual Orientation

Published by Jenni Sidey

The actors in Heated Rivalry don’t leave much to the imagination. While many viewers tuned in for the steamier shower, penthouse, or cabin scenes, some are starting to ask for more personal details. Surprisingly, they’re not asking about the characters Ilya Rozanov or Shane Hollander, but the actors that portray them, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. People want to know whether the actors are bisexual and gay (respectively), just like their characters. To date, neither Storrie nor Williams have disclosed their sexual orientation, though Willaims has since announced his long-term relationship with a woman. When Jacob Tierney, the show’s creator, was pressed about it, he said that there wasn’t “any reason to get into that stuff,” adding that “you can’t ask questions like that when you’re casting, right? It’s actually against the law.” We applaud Tierney’s response. Even if it were legal, we don’t think fans or reporters should ask actors about their sexual orientation. This isn’t the first time that fans of a popular show with queer characters or relationships have asked, and then …

When Should We Argue? | Blog of the APA

When Should We Argue? | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Don’t feed the trolls arguments. When someone is wrong—on the Internet or in the coffee shop—the temptation to engage can be strong, even though it often seems futile. While it can be satisfying and illuminating to argue with friends and some other people with whom we share some degree of trust, arguments with family members, acquaintances, and Internet strangers seem more often to harden positions and risk undermining the knowledge of third parties than to illuminate. Engaging may actually be more effective than it appears. Political partisans do seem to respond to argument; their response is often invisible to us because it is (perhaps rationally) often very small. Given enough evidence, even conspiracy theorists seem to be moved significantly. Argument, even argument with committed partisans, is certainly not always futile. On some topics, though, argument does seem futile. Why? One reason often given is that conspiracy theories and committed partisans often don’t hold their views for reasons. Rather, their views reflect emotional commitments or are a reflection of their identity. Argument and the exchange of …

2022 Central Division Presidential Address: Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known

2022 Central Division Presidential Address: Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known

Published by Jenni Sidey

Below is the audio recording of Jennifer Lackey’s presidential address, “Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known,” given at the 2022 Central Division Meeting. The full text is available on the APA website. The audio of the lecture is available here: “Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known” by Jennifer Lackey Jennifer Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law (courtesy) at Northwestern University, Founding Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and Senior Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. Her research is in social epistemology with a focus on epistemological issues within the American criminal legal system. She is the author of over sixty articles and four books, including her recent Criminal Testimonial Injustice, which won the 2024 North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. She is also the editor or co-editor of six volumes, editor-in-chief of Episteme and Philosophical Studies, and subject editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Lackey was elected to …

Feeling Like Oneself | Blog of the APA

Feeling Like Oneself | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

When I was at graduate school I read a passage from John Campbell that lodged itself somewhere in my brain, where it has remained ever since like a philosophical earworm. This is it: “Our commonsense picture of the causation of conscious thought is that it depends on a background of beliefs, desires and interests, most of which are not themselves conscious at any one time. For example, if you are idly looking out of the window, your idle thoughts will be about people you know or plans you have. Of course, seeing something unexpected, as you look out of the window, can be the cause which opens up new trains of thought. But which trains of thought are opened up will depend on your particular background of beliefs, desires, and interests. Different people could see the same thing yet have quite different thoughts in consequence. This dependence of which thoughts you have on your underlying psychology has to do with our sense of ownership of thoughts: that the particular thoughts you have belong to you…” …

Meet the APA: Asha Bhandary

Meet the APA: Asha Bhandary

Published by Jenni Sidey

Asha Bhandary is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. She works in social and political philosophy as a feminist philosopher. Through her books and articles, she advances a theory called intersectional liberalism, which is a liberal political theory that values personal autonomy while addressing the human needs for care and belonging. She also serves as chair of the APA Committee on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, where one of her main initiatives has been to support Asian American feminism. What is your work about? In Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World, I reimagine liberal philosophy through the lens of intersectionality, showing how race, gender, and caregiving relationships must reshape our understanding of autonomy. As the first care-responsive theory of liberalism to address intersectionality and racism, it makes a unique contribution, reorienting debates about autonomy in liberalism, multiculturalism, and feminist care theory when the “normative subject”—the subject whose experiences informed the idealizations embedded in the conception of the person in the theory—is a biracial woman of color, an Asian woman …

A Black Detective in the White House: The Residence

A Black Detective in the White House: The Residence

Published by Jenni Sidey

Courtesy of Eagle Eye Drama and Huge Designs (UK) [Spoiler alert: Netflix’s The Residence is, in one respect, a mystery about a murderer. Toward the end of this post, the murderer is revealed.] For Bob Grunst, the only twitcher I know “Unpredictable recurrence is not a sign of language’s ambiguity but is a fact: of language, as such, that there are words.”– Stanley Cavell, “Macbeth Appalled” “Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.”– Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich “Would you show me this house? One doesn’t often get the chance.”– Dr. Jacquith to Miss Vale in Now, Voyager Much as Icarus owes his reputation to imitating a bird, so the ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin could attribute his ascent to fame to a goldfinch. The goldfinch appears in Austin’s “most Wittgensteinian piece of writing in terms of method and literary format,” according to Austin’s biographer M. W. Rowe. …

Writing Matters | Blog of the APA

Writing Matters | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Does writing have a future? This eerily prophetic question was posed by media theorist and phenomenologist Vilém Flusser back in 1987. Amidst the ever-expanding use of GenAI in scholarly writing, it is indeed a question that educators are confronted with today. On the one hand, GenAI offers visions of a hopeful future, as it is a powerful tool that enables us to more clearly articulate our thoughts to others. At the same time, the very fact of having to put thoughts down on paper is surely still a crucial skill, one that risks disappearing altogether. As I’ve written about elsewhere, the very existence of GenAI has no doubt forced educators on both sides of the debate to think carefully about what it is that we value as scholarly practices. Although we often talk about GenAI as being “unprecedented,” technological transformations have already existed in embryonic forms throughout human history. The fact is, writing has never been simply an activity of an author putting thoughts on paper. It has always been mediated by various technologies of …