What an [En]tangled Web We Weave: Emotions,Motivation, and Rethinking Us and the “Other”

In Entangled Empathy, Lori Gruen offers an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals. In this article, I examine Gruen's account of entangled empathy by first focusing on entangled empathy's relation to the moral emotions of sympathy, compassion, and other emotions. I then challenge Gruen's account of how entangled empathy moves us to attend to others. Lastly, and without intending to place humans at the center of the conversation, I reflect on the ways entangled empathy can help us solve some human problems—particularly the racial divide in the United States.     

Racial Inequality

In societies with a history of racial oppression, present-day relations between members of different racialised groups are often difficult, tense, prone to escalate into open hostility. This can partly be put down to the persistence of racist beliefs and sentiments. But it is plausible to think there are also non-racist ways in which societal relations between members of different racialised groups go seriously wrong. This is not to downplay the extent to which racism persists: rather, the point is that there exist forms of race-based interaction which, though not racist, are objectionable in their own right. Social equality theory—which understands the ideal of equality not distributively but relationally—can help us to identify and delineate some of these. Taking a social egalitarian approach, I argue that one can identify at least three types of distinctively race-based social inequality, besides racism, which need to be overcome before a society of equals can be realised: ‘racial stigma’, ‘racial discomfort’ and ‘race-based inequality of moral stature’. These forms of race-based social inequality, or ‘racial inequality’, are qualitatively different and call for different types of remedy. Delineating these forms of racial inequality also sheds light on the issue of whether racialised identities should be conserved.     

The Functional Complexity of Scientific Evidence

This article sketches the main features of traditional philosophical models of evidence, indicating idealizations in such models that it regards as doing more harm than good. It then proceeds to elaborate on an alternative model of evidence that is functionalist, complex, dynamic, and contextual, a view the author calls dynamic evidential functionalism (DEF). This alternative builds on insights from philosophy of scientific practice, Kuhnian philosophy of science, pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of experimentation, and functionalist philosophy of mind. Along the way, the article raises concerns about the total evidence condition, requirements of certainty or incorrigibility on evidence, and accounts that restrict the type of things that can serve as evidence (to, for example, sense data, facts about particulars). DEF can also help us see the special value of novel predictions and experiments as evidence, as well as help us think about how to critically evaluate the putative evidence to determine whether it is evidence.     

The production of gender among Black and White women and men: The case of household labor

Using the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 13,017; 11.09% Black, 79.99% White), we compare the household labor time of Black and White women and men, and assess the extent to which the time constraint, relative resource, and ideology explanations account for racial and gender differences in housework time. We find that although time constraint, relative resource, and ideology explanations account for some of the variation in housework time, they do not account for all of the gender and racial differences. We also find that paid work and housework trade off differently for Black men than for White men and also for women and men. Finally, a variety of relative resource, time constraint, and ideology factors are associated differently with women’s and men’s housework time. We argue that our findings lend support to the production of gender approach to understanding the division of household labor and that this approach can be used to help us understand racial differences in housework time as well. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Double Gestures: Feminist Critiques and the Search for a Useable Practice

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucauk: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them—the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain—both attempt to think through and thus revisudize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how “feminism as critique” can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both.     

A Reappraisal of Karl Barth's Theological Development and his Dialogue with Catholicism

This article offers a distinct account of Barth's theological development, one that has an eye toward both the historical record and the contemporary debates about the systematic and ecumenical implications of his theology. It establishes that, from the second edition of Romans until the end of his career, Barth's theological development occurs as a series of internal adjustments in four stages along a single christological trajectory. Barth's dialogues with Catholic theologians play a pivotal role in this development, because these dialogues help him arrive at some of his most important insights. Taken together, these conclusions help us push beyond contemporary divisions between historical and systematic readings of Barth's theology and reframe the dialogue between Barth and Catholic theologians.     

Historical Inquiry to Challenge the Narrative of Racial Progress

This article explores how a curricular intervention that merges antiessentialist historical content and historical inquiry plays a role in how students complicate the narrative of racial progress. The 3-day curricular intervention centers on Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The content and historical inquiry activities explore how (a) Mexican Americans claimed legal Whiteness to gain access to better schools and (b) how Mendez upheld race and language-based segregation. This article outlines how students engage in 4 levels of historical analysis: evidenceless claims, emerging complexity, relational analysis, and multidimensionality. In each type of analysis, students use the antiessentialist historical content to complicate the narrative of racial progress. They highlight, to different degrees, how racial discriminatory policies adapt to continue upholding discrimination. With the antiessentialist historical content in place, the narrative of racial progress functioned as a template, not to emulate but, rather, as a point of comparison. It encouraged students to engage in a complex analysis where they considered how Mendez was an incomplete victory. This research provides insight into levels of analysis that up to now have mostly been theoretical. The larger lesson here, as it applies to how educators teach history, is that (a) the experiences of people of color cannot be essentialized, (b) inquiry can be a useful tool in encouraging historical reasoning that considers such racial/ethnic nuance, and (c) collective memory might be leveraged to encourage students to develop such relational analysis.     

Unsilencing Critical Conversations in Social-Studies Teacher Education using Agent-based Modeling

In this article, we argue that when complex sociopolitical issues such as ethnocentrism and racial segregation are represented as complex, emergent systems using agent-based computational models (in short agent-based models or ABMs), discourse about these representations can disrupt social studies teacher candidates' dispositions of teaching social studies without engaging in critical conversations about race and power. Our study extends the literature on agent-based computing to the domain of social studies education, and demonstrates how preservice teachers' participation in agent-based modeling activities can help them adopt a more critical stance toward designing learning activities for their future classrooms.     

AMPing Racial Attitudes: Comparing the Power of Explicit and Implicit Racism Measures in 2008

In 2008, ANES included for the first time—along with standard explicit measures of old‐fashioned and symbolic racism—the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public opinion during and after the 2008 election, including Americans' views towards several racial policy issues, their evaluations of, and feelings toward, Barack Obama, and their attitudes toward a Black president in general. Oversamples of African American and Latino respondents in the 2008 ANES enable us to broaden our tests of these measures beyond traditional White samples. We find that racial prejudice played an important role for all racial/ethnic groups but that the traditional explicit measures of racism are by far the stronger predictors for all of our dependent variables (compared to the new implicit measure) for both White and Black respondents. Surprisingly, the AMP adds clear explanatory power only to models in the Latino sample.     

Validation of the Black Community Activism Orientation Scale with racially and ethnically diverse college students

This study fills a methodological gap in racial justice research by assessing the utility and validity of the Black Community Activism Orientation Scale (BCAOS) in a racially and ethnically diverse sample of college-going young adults (N = 624, M = 19.4 years, SD = 1.89) from 10 colleges in the United States. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to estimate the goodness of fit of the proposed three-factor model and assess the validity of the BCAOS. Findings from the confirmatory factor analysis provide statistical support for use of the BCAOS as a measure of racial justice activism in support of Black communities among racially and ethnically diverse college-going young adults. Findings from the study also suggest that White college students and men are less oriented toward racial justice activism than women and racially marginalized students. Convergent and discriminant validity were established through bivariate correlations of the BCAOS factors with other civic development measures. As more and more young people consider the importance of standing against racial oppression, the BCAOS has utility as an assessment instrument in future racial justice research, education, intervention, and youth programming efforts.     

Formulation in groups,or understanding what is going on

This article emphasizes the development of formulations as a framework from which leaders can intervene effectively in assisting groups to work toward their stated goals. The concept of formulation, used as a teaching tool to help students and supervisees conceptualize group issues, is presented, as is a schema whose purpose is to teach steps leading to clear formulations. The schema simplifies, for the purposes of teaching and supervision, the complex process used by experienced group therapists as a basis for interventions. The schema emphasizes perception, affect, cognition, validation, intervention, and evaluation. Here-and-now processes, conscious and unconscious mechanisms, and group affect also are stressed.     

Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment

America's judicial system is both exceptionally punitive and demonstrably unjust toward racial minorities. While these dual realities are structured into America's institutions, we propose they are also partially sustained by the intersection of ideologies that are both racialized and sacralized. Using multiple waves of the General Social Surveys and a unique measure that asks Americans to choose between two forms of judicial injustice (wrongful conviction or erroneous acquittal), we examine how white racial identity intersects with biblical literalism to bolster America's bent toward unjust punitiveness. In the main effects, Americans who affirm biblical literalism are more likely to show a preference for convicting the innocent, as are whites compared to Black Americans. Examining interaction effects, however, we find whiteness moderates the influence of biblical literalism such that only white biblical literalists (as opposed to non‐white biblical literalists or white non‐biblical literalists) are more likely to prefer wrongful conviction. Indeed, in our full model, being a white biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of preferring wrongful conviction. We theorize that preference for wrongful conviction over erroneous acquittal stems, at least in part, from the combination of sacralized authoritarianism and perceived racial threat.     

More eyes on the prize: variability in White Americans' perceptions of progress toward racial equality

Much recent research suggests that Whites and non-Whites think differently about issues of race in contemporary America. For example, Eibach and Ehrlinger (2006) recently demonstrated that Whites perceive that more progress toward racial equality has been made as compared to non-Whites. The authors of this article sought to extend Eibach and Ehrlinger's analysis. To this end, they found that differences in Whites' and non-Whites' perceptions of racial progress can be explained by the reference points they use for understanding progress toward racial equality (Study 1). Furthermore, they demonstrated that there is variability in White people's perceptions of racial progress that can be explained by self-reported racial prejudice (Studies 1 and 2). Finally, they demonstrated that White people's perceptions of racial progress predict reactions to affirmative action (Study 2). Implications for better understanding intergroup relations and reactions to social policies are discussed.     

Thoughts from a Safe Harbor: Commentary on The Problem of Thinking by Yvette Esprey

Yvette Esprey’s claim that race has the capacity to disrupt thinking in the analytic situation accords with my own experience. In this discussion I take up the question as to why ruptures that occur around race may have a special capacity to disrupt and disable analytic thinking. I look in detail at Esprey’s instructive clinical experience as it gives us a template, something to fall back on, in those moments when anxiety overwhelms us around a racial disruption. Such a template can settle us until we can restore a sense of self that is both raced and analytically focused on the rupture at hand with all its personal and social/historical resonances.     

The Costs of Silencing the Self and Divided Self in the Context of Physical Abuse,Racial/Ethnic Identity,and Medication Adherence in Women Living with HIV

Racial/ethnic minority status and physical abuse history are risk factors for higher mortality rates and lower adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in women living with HIV (WLWH) in the United States. The current study tested the hypotheses that minority status and physical abuse history might lead women to silence the self (minimize and hide thoughts and feelings in order to avoid relational conflict, loss, and/or abuse) as measured by the Silencing the Self Scale (STSS), and that STSS might mediate and moderate relationships of physical abuse and racial/ethnic minority status with ART adherence. Divided Self (DS; acting in ways inconsistent with inner thoughts and feelings), an STSS subscale, was targeted for study along with the total STSS score. Participants were 513 women from the U.S. Women’s Interagency HIV Study (M_age?=?46; 387, 75%, Black; 66, 13%, Hispanic; 60, 12%, White). Multiple logistic regressions indicated that across all racial/ethnic groups, physical abuse history related to higher DS and lower adherence. DS significantly mediated relationships between abuse and adherence. Compared to White women, Black women demonstrated worse ART adherence, but had lower total STSS. Racial/ethnic minority women and women with a physical abuse history who had higher DS had lower adherence than other groups. Results indicate that being a racial/ethnic minority or having a history of physical abuse may increase vulnerability to the deleterious effects of DS on ART adherence, findings that can help inform interventions to decrease health disparities in WLWH.

     

Perpetrator Abhorrence: Disgust as a Stop Sign

Most contemporary research on disgust can be divided into “disgust advocates” and “disgust skeptics.” The so‐called advocates argue that disgust can have a positive influence on our moral judgment; skeptics warn that it can mislead us toward prejudice and discrimination. This article compares this disagreement to a structurally similar debate in the field of genocide studies concerning the phenomenon of “perpetrator abhorrence.” While some soldiers report having felt strong disgust in the moment of committing or witnessing atrocity, scholars disagree on whether such disgust is moral in nature. These empirical cases provide us with reasons to reconsider the normative features of disgust. Inspired by the conceptualization of disgust in Immanuel Kant and Aurel Kolnai, and as an alternative to both the disgust advocates and the skeptics, this article argues that the analogy of a stop sign can better help us define disgust responses.     

On the Nature and Meaning of Human Finitude

This article considers the interaction between psychoanalysis and philosophy by examining the meaning of human finitude in the work of Freud and Heidegger. Although Freud and Heidegger develop radically different systems of thought, they are surprisingly close in their examination of the human attitude toward death. Freud's philosophical reflections on the nature of death are ultimately subsumed in his speculative theory of the death instinct, which is far removed from the lived experience of finitude. Heidegger's ontological account of death draws from lived experience but neglects the relational nature of finitude. Drawing on the connection between the work of Binswanger and Stolorow, I maintain that finitude is a fundamentally relational phenomenon. While philosophy can help us to understand and formulate an account of human finitude, the relational nature of psychoanalysis can help us bear the trauma associated with death.     

Metaphysics XII 7, 1072A27-B1: An Argument of Identity

The paper analyses the argumentative structure of a difficult passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics XII 7 on the basis of a topos of sameness provided in Top. VII 1. In doing this the article gives an example of how Aristotle's treatises on dialectic can prove useful to understand what he says in his more philosophically committed writings. The article also shows how general argumentative techniques and more or less explicit specific philosophical assumptions interact in shaping Aristotle's arguments and how the distinction of these different factors can help us have a better grasp on Aristotle's text.     

Can Conflicting Perspectives on the Role of g in Personnel Selection Be Resolved?

Cognitive ability tests represent the best single predictor of job performance, but also represent the predictor most likely to have substantial adverse impact on employment opportunities for members of several racial and ethnic minority groups. Debates over the use of these tests in selection often involve trade-offs between two criteria that are valued by decision makers-that is, efficiency and equity. Findings and methods from decision research can help us frame these trade-offs, but in most cases they cannot be avoided.