Philosophy

In this timely collection, gender, sex, and technology are explored through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. Gender, Sex, and Tech! provides insight into the ways that technology affects, and is affected by, cultural perceptions of gender and sex. Through an examination of a range of past and present issues, the text highlights our relationships to technology and illustrates how gendered relations are shaped and transformed through social and technological innovations. Contributors bring to the fore feminist, decolonizing, and anti-racist methods to examine our everyday uses of technology, from the mundane to the surreal to the playful to the devastating. Original research and scholarship is skillfully grounded in real-world scenarios like revenge pornography, gender bias in artificial intelligence, menstrual tracking, online dating, and the COVID-19 pandemic, inviting students to take a closer look at technological transformations and their impact on gendered lived experience and to consider how the benefits of technology are inequitably shared within society. Centring Canadian scholars and Canadian perspectives without losing sight of the broader global connection, Gender, Sex, and Tech! is bursting with timely and of-the-moment content, making this collection a must-read for courses focused on gender and technology.

Important work on alignment systems has been applied to philosophical work on joint action by Tollefsen and Dale. This paper builds from and expands on their work. The first aim of the paper is to spell out how the empirical research on alignment may be integrated into philosophical theories of joint action. The second aim is then to develop a successful characterization of joint action, which spells out the difference between genuine joint action and simpler forms of coordination based on alignment. I begin by introducing the empirical research and two definitions of joint action. I then argue that instead of using this research in conjunction with Searle’s account of collective intentionality, as Tollefsen and Dale suggest, we would be better served by applying this research to Gilbert’s account of plural subjects. In the final sections I distinguish between alignment, coordination, and joint action, clarify the roles of joint commitment and sub-personal alignment in joint action, and argue that these concepts are both consistent and mutually supportive. Combining these two research programs gives us an account of joint action that does justice to both the empirical and philosophical research.

This dissertation gives a philosophical account of acting together with others in the sense of collaboration or partnership. One part of that project is empirical. I report and elaborate on experimental research conducted on our everyday notion of acting together in order to better understand what it is. Another part, which offers a philosophical theory of how we do it, defends the “higher-order interdependence view” of collective intention. I argue that, compared to other kinds of existing views, this theory provides the best explanation of the results of the empirical research.

Since the publication of his last book-length political polemic, 'Hatred of Democracy' (2005), the work of Jacques Rancière has generally focused on developing the conceptual and historical features of his account of aesthetics. With the recent publication of his 2009 debate with Axel Honneth, 'Recognition or Disagreement?' (2016), we have good reason to return to his political thought as it is outlined in 'Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy' (1995) and related texts such as his “Ten The ses on Politics” (1998). Programmatically speaking, Rancière conceives of politics as a practice of dissensus enacted in the name of equality. But in examining the debate between Rancière and Honneth, Jean-Philippe Deranty and Katia Genel have recently sought to reframe Rancière’s account of dissensus in the terms of Honneth’s theory of recognition. Drawing on the subtitle of Disagreement, it is necessary to critique Deranty and Genel both at the level of politics and how this politics implicates philosophy. Elsewhere, I have already indicated how reframing dissensus as a form of the politics of recognition blunts the radicality of Rancière’s methodological commitments. I will not revisit these claims here. Instead, I would like to dispel the assumption that makes this “recognition” reading—as one variant of a generally liberal reading of Rancière—possible. On this assump tion, Rancière holds that dissensual speech is political action. As Deranty writes, “politics in Disagreement is a battle of justifications, mainly a battle about what counts as justification and who is entitled to proffer and expect justifications.” But Rancière’s work isn’t about how to distribute social goods and allocate duties and entitlements to such a degree that we will willingly accept inequalities in our societies. So I will argue, by contrast, that for Rancière speech functions as a me tonymy for a broader praxis of egalitarian, dissensual politics. More specifically, I will contend that Rancière’s egalitarian politics entails two forms of praxis: the symbolization of equality through dissensus and the subversion or elimination of relationships of command, coercion, or force implemented by regimes of policing.

A collection of essays and other texts of popular philosophy written by best-selling author, Michael Picard, MSc PhD, the MIT-trained philosopher who has facilitated hundreds of Cafe Philosophy dialogues with the public, for which the entries in this accidental lexicon were composed. Intended to stimulate readers' thoughts prior to public participatory philosophy sessions, Picard's writing invites the reader on a tour de force of the philosophical dimensions of contemporary life. This anti-dictionary explodes the meanings of philosophically-intriguing concepts as it defines and un-defines them. Written by MIT-trained philosopher and author of best-selling This is not a Book (2007), this unique alphabetical collection of provocative essays and other texts tease and treat the reader to fresh and foreign perspectives on dozens of philosophy topics of interest to thinking public and critical seekers anywhere. At times playful or profound, alternately skeptical and reverential, the entries in this philosophical lexicon push paradox and pull for pluralism, spanning the vast range of philosophy, ancient and modern, East and West, social and spiritual, moral and metaphysical, and yet more. This book is for people yearning to explore have fun gaining new perspectives and thinking for themselves, and ready to have their minds ignited by the curious, all-consuming questioning spirit of philosophy. -- From publisher description.