Philosophy

In this essay, I argue against the skepticism, which has grown after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which says humanitarian intervention is unjustified. By drawing on Josiah Royce's work urging U.S. involvement in the first World War, I maintain that such action, including the use of military force, can be conceived of as a tool for the forging of a global community firmly committed to peace, cooperation, and human rights.

In 1971, Chicano activist Armando Re´ndon began to chart new directions for Chicana/o politics that move away from a narrow emphasis on cultural and ethnic nationalism. He argues that urban Chicana/o neighborhoods ought develop community-based organizations to provide support services for residents and to advocate local concerns to elected officials. In the first part of this essay, I reconstruct Re´ndon's concept of a 'barrio union' as an example of participatory democracy. I situate his concept of neighborhood democracy within Mexican American and Progressive movement history, and then highlight contemporary experiments with this model that are particularly successful in transforming traditionally marginalized individuals into active democratic participants. I then suggest that the barrio union is a repository of cultural, ethical, and political ideals that might be used by progressive Chicana/o activists to challenge the meaning of dominant institutions and political traditions within the United States, particularly the ways in which we conceive of race and American citizenship.

Many of the early American pragmatists, including John Dewey, Horace Kallen, and Jane Addams conceived of a multicultural America as a culturally pluralistic democracy with different ethnic communities bringing their common cultural values, social practices, moral beliefs, and ideals of excellence and human flourishing into conversation with one another, learning from one another, and articulating a shared conception of civic cooperation within deep democracy. W.E.B. Du Bois’s work is precisely about the cultural contributions of African Americans to US American political life.  Starting in 1897, in his essay, “The Conservation of the Races”, Du Bois advances a notion of cultural pluralism that predates the classical pragmatist reflections on the nature of a multicultural United States. Du Bois believes that the unique cultural contribution of African Americans consists of a particular understanding, arrived at through their centuries of experience with subordination and marginalization in white supremacist society, about the nature of power and democratic governance in the United States that has the potential to radically shift the direction of American society. I examine two main points in this line of thought.  First, Du Bois thinks that we ought not to abandon the notion of race and become a race neutral or colorblind society and instead preserve the notion of races as communities that may possess unique cultural gifts to contribute to the betterment of American democracy.  Second, Du Bois thinks that the unique cultural gifts of African Americans have already altered the United States, not just in terms of cultural forms such as jazz or soul food, but in terms of the ethical foundations of US American democracy.  Du Bois believes that in their particular pursuit of equality and liberty, African Americans have created a society that is much more moral and democratic than what the Founders intended.  More importantly, Du Bois believes their struggle offers a prophetic vision that portends an even more participatory and deliberative United States.

This seminar uses George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, as a springboard for thinking about social justice in today’s society.  As such, we are not so much interested in a literary analysis of the novel, but in the lessons, if any, it has for thinking about subjects such as the nature of oppression, political coercion, individual identity and autonomy, and human desire and sexual expression.

Cesar Chavez is widely considered to be the most prominent Latino civil rights icon in the United States.  In this talk, I will present several lessons that we can take from La Causa, the struggle of the farm workers, for doing social justice organizing today.  I will also consider several warnings about the kind of leadership we ought to avoid in doing social justice work, based on the conflicts within the United Farm Workers union toward the end of Chavez’s life.

This course involves a philosophical investigation of the concepts of peace, nonviolence, and conflict in the Americas (North and South) through the use of film.  We will take a mixed historical and topical approach. Beginning with the European invasion of the Americas, we will examine the effects of colonialism and conquest on indigenous communities, the rise of revolutionary resistance movements, human rights developments surrounding state terrorism in Latin America, the push and pull factors affecting contemporary immigration to North America, and the violence surrounding drug and weapons trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a similar spirit, I want to present the idea of Mexican American philosophy as a new field of study that can enrich the conception of philosophy, and of public life, in the United States. I begin by examining the conditions for the possibility of such a specialization as Mexican American philosophy, drawing on debates in Latin America about the aims and nature of philosophy, for comparison.  I then identify several authors who might serve as the beginning of a canon for Mexican American philosophy.  I maintain that Du Bois’s early examination of African American thought offers suggestions for the way in which this area of specialization might develop.  Mexican American philosophy can provide both a theoretical lens for the Mexican American community to understand its relationship to dominant society in the United States, as well as philosophical insights that can help to correct any systematic epistemic distortion in social and political philosophy that results from the lack of diversity within the profession.

The catalyst for much of classical pragmatist political thought was the great waves of migration to the United States in the early twentieth century. José-Antonio Orosco examines the work of several pragmatist social thinkers, including John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams, regarding the challenges large-scale immigration brings to American democracy. Orosco argues that the ideas of the classical pragmatists can help us understand the ways in which immigrants might strengthen the cultural foundations of the United States in order to achieve a more deliberative and participatory democracy. Like earlier pragmatists, Orosco begins with a critique of the melting pot in favor of finding new ways to imagine the civic role of our immigrant population. He concludes that by applying the insights of American pragmatism, we can find guidance through controversial contemporary issues such as undocumented immigration, multicultural education, and racialized conceptions of citizenship.

All eyes are turned towards genomic data and models as the source of knowledge about whether human races exist or not. Will genomic science make the final decision about whether racial realism (e.g. racial population naturalism) or anti-realism (e.g. racial scepticism) is correct? We think not. The results of even our best and most impressive genomic technologies underdetermine whether biogenomic races exist, or not. First, different sub-disciplines of biology interested in population structure employ distinct concepts, aims, measures and models, producing cross-cutting categorisations of population subdivisions rather than a single, universal biogenomic concept of 'race.' Second, within each sub-discipline (e.g. phylogenetics, conservation biology), genomic results are consistent with, and map multiply to, racial realism and anti-realism. Indeed, racial ontologies are constructed conventionally, rather than discovered. We thus defend a constructivist conventionalism about biogenomic racial ontology. Choices and conventions must always be made in identifying particular kinds of groups. Political agendas, social programmes, and moral questions premised on the existence of naturalistic race should accept that no scientifically grounded racial ontology is forthcoming, and adjust presumptions, practices and projects accordingly.

Lewis et al. (2011) attempted to restore the reputation of Samuel George Morton, a 19th century physician who reported on the skull sizes of different folk-races. Whereas Gould (1978) claimed that Morton's conclusions were invalid because they reflected unconscious bias, Lewis et al. alleged that Morton's findings were, in fact, supported, and Gould's analysis biased. We take strong exception to Lewis et al.'s thesis that Morton was "right." We maintain that Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available. Lewis et al. fail to recognize that there is, given the dataset available, no appropriate way to answer any of the plausibly interesting questions about the "populations" in question (which in many cases are not populations in any biologically meaningful sense). We challenge the premise shared by both Gould and Lewis et al. that Morton's confused data can be used to draw any meaningful conclusions. This, we argue, reveals the importance of properly focusing on the questions asked, rather than more narrowly on the data gathered.