Greg Moses

Martin Luther King, Jr., has been widely studied as a preacher, an activist, and an orator, but rarely as an intellectual. This groundbreaking book situates King as one of the most important social and political philosophers of our time, arguing that King's systematic logic of nonviolence is at the same time radically new and deeply rooted in African American intellectual history. Presenting a comprehensive genealogy of King's thought, Moses traces the influence of key African American thinkers and shows how King's concepts of equality, structure, direct action, love, and justice can be seen as strands of a coherent philosophical whole. [As of Feb. 2014 the author has secured reversion of copyright from the publisher.]

After decades of service to The Acorn, editor Barry Gan--who received the journal from founding editor Ha Poong Kim--has passed the responsibility along. We are happy to announce that the editorial and business office of The Acorn has found a new home at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of Texas State University. For more than a decade, The Acorn has been affiliated with a society that we have recently renamed the Gandhi, King, Chavez, Addams Society (GKCAS). The new name adds Cesar Chavez and Jane Addams to the short list of role models that the society seeks to honor through scholarly study, but the short list is not intended to be exclusive. As a result of reorganization and transition we are adopting a new subtitle of the journal as follows, The Acorn: Philosophical Studies in Pacifism and Nonviolence.

As if anticipating the thesis that we live at the end of history, Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that we live in perpetual struggle against evil and injustice. In his last monograph, King outlined six challenges facing black Americans seeking justice. These six challenges may be generalized into a nonviolent theory of social struggle applicable to various contexts. King's six challenges are reviewed: somebodyness, group identity, existing freedoms, powerful action programs, continuing organization, and a revolution of values. In this framework, we see how King understood civil rights activism in a complex context of liberation, not confined to "protest."

Drawing on contexts of critical theory offered by Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, and Angela Davis, this article argues that Alain Locke’s theory of valuation should be of interest to theorists who apprehend struggle as a process of desire. Locke’s value theory with its classification of “form-feelings” may be used to develop appreciation for value’s genealogical dependence on desire. This has consequences for theorizing the challenges faced by liberation from oppressive structures. A case study is provided from popular film.

A review of Allison Weir’s book, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity, Routledge, 1996. Weir argues that even among feminists, ontological theories of self often commit the fallacy of sacrifice. Such ‘sacrificial logics’ presuppose that one self may only emerge in opposition to some other self; the birth of one implying the sacrifice of another. Weir does not dispute that self-developments in history often assume the costly logic of sacrifice, but she does not want us to import into our theory an assumption that such sacrifice is inevitable. One consequence of the fallacy is the claim that making peace requires renunciation of the struggle for self-identity as such, thereby casting suspicion on so-called identity politics.