Three Scalarities

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. A. Garcia

This article examines the discussions of degrees of racialization, degrees of racism, and degrees of race (or so-called racial authenticity) in Lawrence Blum’s book:‘ I’m Not a Racist, But...’. It identifies some conceptual and moral difficulties with Blum’s analyses, but argues that they nonetheless open promising avenues for further philosophical research into these and related concepts at the foundations of race relations. It concludes that such research into the concepts through which we articulate our understandings of the social realm is best pursued through logical and linguistic analysis that places those concepts in the context of a philosophically developed and defended moral theory.

Author(s):  
J. K. Swindler

We are social animals in the sense that we spontaneously invent and continuously re-invent the social realm. But, not unlike other artifacts, once real, social relations, practices, institutions, etc., obey prior laws, some of which are moral laws. Hence, with regard to social reality, we ought to be ontological constructivists and moral realists. This is the view sketched here, taking as points of departure Searle's recent work on social ontology and May's on group morality. Moral and social selves are distinguished to acknowledge that social reality is constructed but social morality is not. It is shown how and why moral law requiring respect for the dignity and well being of agents governs a social world comprising roles that are real only because of their occupants' social intentions.


2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-340
Author(s):  
Stephanie Smith

AbstractThis work critically examines the moral theology of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. In his writings as Wojtyla, and later as John Paul II, the theme of human dignity served as the starting point for his moral theology. This article first describes his conception of human dignity as influenced by Thomist and by phenomenological sources. The Thomist philosophy of being provided Wojtyla with an optimistic view of the epistemic and moral capacity of human persons. Wojtyla argued that because of the analogia entis, humans gain epistemic access to the normative order of God as well as the moral capacity to live in accordance with the law of God. Built upon the foundation of his Thomist assumptions, Wojtyla's phenomenological research enriched his insight into human dignity by arguing in favour of the formative nature of human action. He argued that human dignity rested also in this dynamism of personhood: the capacity not only to live in accordance with the normative order but to form oneself as virtuous by partaking in virtuous acts or to form one's community in solidarity through acts of participation and self-giving. After presenting his moral theology, this article then engages critically with his assumptions from a Protestant perspective. I argue that, while human dignity provides a powerful and beneficial starting point for ethics, his Thomist ontology of being/substance and the optimistic terms in which he interprets human dignity ultimately undermine his social programme. I propose that an ontology of relation provides a better starting point for interpreting human dignity and for appealing for acts of solidarity in the social realm.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Carter

This paper is a qualitative content analysis of public tweets made during the Indigenous social movement, Idle No More, containing the #upsettler and #upsettlers hashtags. Using settler colonial theory coupled with previous literature on Twitter during social movements as a guiding framework, this study identifies how settler colonial relations were being constructed on Twitter and how functions of the social networking tool such as the hashtag impacted this process. By examining and analyzing the content of 278 tweets, this study illustrates that Twitter is a site where conversations about race relations in Canada are taking place and that the use of the hashtag function plays a vital role in expanding the reach of this online discussion and creating a sense of solidarity or community among users.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 580
Author(s):  
Paula Cristina Lameu

Some scholars and researchers have been claiming we are in a New Materialist and Posthumanist era. It means that for the ones who are researching in Social Sciences, the focus is not only the human as the centre and the cause of what happens in the social realm. For human, nonhuman and inhuman are attributed the same importance in research once all of them are components of reality, inserted in nature.Reality is regarded as complex, not simple straightforward isolated cause and effect processes. This is how the classroom is supposed to be observed in educational research: not only teaching and learning, but these two processes and policy making, and identity construction, and emotional flows, and curriculum, and schooling, and…, and…The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the complexity of the classroom environment regarded as an assemblage. The hypothesis is that all the components of the assemblage are equally vital, although some components are more vibratory than others. The theory of Vitalism from Driesch (1914) and the Vital Materialism from Bennett (2010a, 2010b) are used as the theoretical tools for analysis. Assemblage Ethnography (YOUDELL, 2015; YOUDELL and MCGIMPSEY, 2015) is the methodology of data collection. A multiple case study was developed in three different schools in United Kingdom: one Primary, one Secondary and one Post-secondary. The results suggest that teacher and students are the components who most influence on the classroom assemblage composition, decomposition and recomposition orienting the flows of matter-energy once they are change-creating agents.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 496
Author(s):  
Rafia Bilal ◽  
Wasima Shehzad

This research focuses on the discourse analysis of the text written on Pakistani public transport vehicles. The data were collected from the roads, parking lots and market places in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The text was written in three languages, English, Urdu and Punjabi. The sample size was fifty but in order to delimit the study, the data size was reduced to ten. The data classification was done keeping into consideration the grounded theory, as the thematic categories of data emerged after data collection. They included love for religion, parents, opposite sex and country. Moreover, it highlighted the theme of morality, socio-economic problems, desire for upward mobility and wisdom-based quotations. The data were then analyzed keeping in mind Janks’ rubrics for linguistic analysis. The linguistic analysis showed that the text employs lexicalization, overlexicalization, lexical cohesion and there is extensive use of metaphors, euphemism and personification. It was noted that the text was multilingual as it was in Urdu, Punjabi or English language with a lot of code switching. The data were then further analyzed to highlight the social and moral attributes of language users, the socio-economic problems they face and their struggle for upward mobility. The social analysis provided a deep insight into the life of public transport drivers in Pakistani society.


2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Teresa Tosi ◽  
Maria Luisa De Luca ◽  
Cinzia Messana
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-185
Author(s):  
Kamala Visweswaran

Drawing upon the court case of one woman sentenced for killing her infant in the early decades of the last century, this article reads Pierre Bourdieu’s insight on how the trial stages conflicts produced in the social realm as a paradox for explaining how British administrators and Indian village officials negotiated non-conflicting codes of sexual and moral conduct on the basis of colonial ideology and locally fixed caste hierarchies to convict women of infanticide. This article argues that a staging of women’s agency is crucial for understanding the colonial conferral of legal subjectivity and for a gendered critique of the Subaltern Studies paradigm of conflict or collaboration as ‘dominance without hegemony.’


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabri Ciftci ◽  
F. Michael Wuthrich ◽  
Ammar Shamaileh

Despite a wealth of studies examining Muslim religiosity and democracy, uncertainty regarding Islam and attitudes toward democracy remains. Although the claims concerning the incompatibility of Islam and democracy are generally discarded, public opinion scholarship has yet to build much further from this important first step or incorporate a strong theoretical framework for analysis beyond this basic foundation. This paper seeks to integrate literature in social theory on religious worldviews with novel conceptualizations and measurement of distinct religious outlooks among the religious faithful to explain patterns in attitudes toward democracy. We construct a theory with clear expectations regarding these relationships and use the largest and best available survey data (Arab Democracy Barometer, Wave III) to test our predictions using latent class analysis and a series of multivariate regression estimations. The results of our empirical analysis reveal that there are important differences among practicing Muslims regarding the role that religion should play in the social realm and that these differences are relevant to the analysis of how faith shapes preferences for regime type and democracy. The analysis makes a significant contribution to the study of religion and political attitudes.


2022 ◽  

Research on pre-Columbian childhood refers to all those studies that consider the different evidence and expressions of children in Mesoamerica, prior to the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Archaeology, understandably by its very focus, has been one of the most prolific disciplines that has approached this subject of study. Currently, archaeological research focuses on highlighting the different social experiences of the past (or multi-vocality) of social identities, such as gender and childhood, and its relationship with material culture. In addition, archaeologists recognize a modern stereotype that considers children as passive or dependent beings and therefore biases childhood research in the past. Consequently, it is necessary to critically evaluate the cultural specificity of past childhood since each culture has its own way of considering that stage of the life cycle. Another problem, in the archaeological study of childhood, is to consider that children are not socially important individuals. It has been said that their activities are not significant for the economy or the social realm of communities and societies of the past. From archaeology, there exists a general perception that children are virtually unrecognizable from the archaeological record because their behavior leaves few material traces, apart from child burials. It has been since feminist critiques within the discipline that the study of childhood became of vital importance in archaeology to understand the process of gender acquisition through enculturation. This process refers to the way children learn about their gender identity through the material world that surrounds them and the various rituals that prepare them to become persons. Thus, the intent of recent studies on childhood has been to call upon archaeologists to consider children as social actors capable of making meaningful decisions on their own behalf and that they make substantial contributions to their families and their communities. In this sense, studies on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures have focused at the most basic sense on identifying the presence of children in the archaeological record or ethnohistoric sources. Its aim has been to document the different social ages that make up childhood, the ritual importance of Mesoamerican children, funerary practices, and health conditions marked in children’s bones as well as the different material and identity expressions of childhood through art and its associated material culture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-300
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan ◽  
Russell Powell

Abstract Commentators on The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory raise a number of metaethical and moral concerns with our analysis, as well as some complaints regarding how we have interpreted and made use of the contemporary evolutionary and social sciences of morality. Some commentators assert that one must already presuppose a moral theory before one can even begin to theorize moral progress; others query whether the shift toward greater inclusion is really a case of moral progress, or whether our theory can be properly characterized as ‘naturalistic’. Other commentators worry that we have uncritically accepted the prevailing evolutionary explanation of morality, even though it gives short shrift to the role of women or presupposes an oversimplified view of the environment in which the core elements of human moral psychology are thought to have congealed. Another commentator laments that we did not make more extensive use of data from the social sciences. In this reply, we engage with all of these constructive criticisms and show that although some of them are well taken, none undermine the core thesis of our book.


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