Nancy Tuana

Human desire usually has an object of longing or hope. The more intense the desire, the more singularly prominent its object. Sides, after all, means “heavenly body.” When people desire, they want, crave, and even covet the desired, whether the desired is ice cream, a professorship, or another’s body. What is intensely desired, even if it is not heavenly, has the status of an object with exceptional and immediate meaning and draw. When simple desire finds satisfaction, the desired’s attraction withers in its completeness, and the object fades into the ordinary environment, not unlike the disinterest we experience after we have overindulged in Chunky Monkey or the indifference to the..

We are concerned with borders and their crucial importance in people's lives. Throughout we place emphasis on liberatory critique and knowledge and on the importance of the forces lineages exercise in the ways we live. How might we speak of whatever is bordered and allow that of which we speak its manifest differences? How are we able to engage differences and maintain our own differences? How might we, as philosophers, speak philosophically about what is beyond philosophy? Such speaking would constitute an art, a philosophical art, that is guided by unspeakable differences. After developing the concepts of border, in-between, sensibility, and mutations of lineages, we turn to Gloria Anzaldúa's accounts of border awareness and her experiences of it. Through an engagement with her account of nepantla, we offer reflections on the force that “beyond” can have in the happenings of liberatory philosophies. In doing so, we emphasize her conceptions of border arte and her manner of bringing it to expression. In that process we find parts of Alejandro Vallega's work helpful in elaborating radical exteriority, fluid margins, and “ana-chronic” sensibilities. We are engaging a philosophical understanding that gives us bridges that provide thresholds beyond philosophy.

We begin at the site of borders, the demarcations between us, between: my body and your body, humans and nonhuman animals, habits of thought and institutional structures, nature and culture, subject and object. We find ourselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. Differences, distinctions, and borders are key to knowing and acting responsibly. Yet we are “held captive” by particular habits of understanding that police such borders with unbecoming fervor. We desire to trouble these borders with the aim of transforming habits of thought and embodied dispositions, to give rise to new appreciations of difference through the deep, ongoing play of the in-between. Ours is an ontology of the in-between...

This article gives an account of the paradox that happens when liberatory reforms bring with them, simultaneously and in addition to the reforming values and practices, oppressive customs, beliefs, and authoritative knowledges. How can activists become aware of the paradox? How can they transform oppressive practices and systems of power and not bring with them other oppressive practices and systems of power? In responding to these questions, the article emphasizes: the importance of animating the paradoxes instead of attempting to eliminate them; making transverse and transforming movements instead of direct attacks on oppressive formations; finding all “solutions” questionable; and in the absence of stable foundations advancing an approach Tuana and Scott call “hyper-activism.”

The primary goal of this article is to find an interplay of concepts that will help us to write about the broad transformative potential of Gloria Anzaldúa's experiences of what she calls nepantla in her posthumously published Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). We want to integrate these concepts into our reading of her account of nepantla and to allow her language to further animate the force and meaning of the concepts' interactive connections. The concepts are assemblage, occasion, lineages, sensibility, and temporality. The article concludes with her own culminating understanding of nepantla. The leading topics are Anzaldúa's world, the Coyolxauhqui process, rebirth, and cuerpoespíritu.

"This highly-readable work traces a set of beliefs about the nature of woman that have informed, and in turn have been reinforced by, science, religion, and philosophy from the classical period to the nineteenth century.... [T]his book’s analysis lends support to claims that the gender system affected our very conceptions of science." —Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences "An important book for the educated general public as well as for scholars in many disciplines. Highly recommended." —Library Journal "Students and researchers alike will welcome this carefully argued volume that so clearly traces the dominant contours of Western conceptions about women." —Isis "Nancy Tuana’s book is brillant. In under two hundred pages she presents a concise account of how women have been perceived in relation to men in the Western world for the past 2,500 years."—American Historical Review "A wide-ranging discussion of conceptions of women in science, philosophy and religion from ancient times to the late nineteenth century, Tuana’s book makes it devastatingly clear how powerful and how deeply rooted was the Western idea of women as men’s inferiors."—Women’s Review of Books "... an unusually readable account of the image of women from the Greeks to the nineteenth century, wedded to a highly interesting argument about the way religion and philosophy affect the direction of the work of scientists, and how the work of scientists is used by philosophers and clergy to give authority to the more abstract world of ideas." —Magill Book Reviews Provides a framework for understanding the persistence of the Western patriarchal view of woman as inferior. Tuana examines beliefs that were accepted a priori as evidence of women’s inferiority and studies early theories of woman’s nature to illustrate the way scientific literature, was influenced by—and in turn affected—religious and philosophical tenets.

_Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices._ Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.

Revealing Male Bodies is the first scholarly collection to directly confront male lived experience. There has been an explosion of work in men’s studies, masculinity issues, and male sexuality, in addition to a growing literature exploring female embodiment. Missing from the current literature, however, is a sustained analysis of the phenomenology of male-gendered bodies. Revealing Male Bodies addresses this omission by examining how male bodies are physically and experientially constituted by the economic, theoretical, and social practices in which men are immersed. Contributors include Susan Bordo, William Cowling, Terry Goldie, Maurice Hamington, Don Ihde, Greg Johnson, Björn Krondorfer, Alphonso Lingis, Patrick McGann, Paul McIlvenny, Terrance MacMullan, Jim Perkinson, Steven P. Schacht, Richard Schmitt, Nancy Tuana, Craig L. Wilkins, and John Zuern.

Climate risks are growing. Research is increasingly important to inform the design of risk-management strategies. Assessing such strategies necessarily brings values into research. But the values assumed within research (often only implicitly) may not align with those of stakeholders and decision makers. These misalignments are often invisible to researchers and can severely limit research relevance or lead to inappropriate policy advice. Aligning strategy assessments with stakeholders' values requires a holistic approach to research design that is oriented around those values from the start. Integrating values into research in this way requires collaboration with stakeholders, integration across disciplines, and attention to all aspects of research design. Here we describe and demonstrate a qualitative conceptual tool called a values-informed mental model (ViMM) to support such values-centered research design. ViMMs map stakeholders' values onto a conceptual model of a study system to visualize the intersection of those values with coupled natural-human system dynamics. Through this mapping, ViMMs integrate inputs from diverse collaborators to support the design of research that assesses risk-management strategies in light of stakeholders' values. We define a visual language for ViMMs, describe accompanying practices and workflows, and present an illustrative application to the case of flood-risk management in a small community along the Susquehanna river in the Northeast United States.

The articles in this special issue are a selection of those presented at the conference, “Critical Philosophy of Race after Ten Years,” held in March 2022. The conference commemorated the tenth year of publication of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race. Although philosophical engagement with the concept of race was not new to the field of philosophy, the journal, indeed the term “critical philosophy of race,” served as a catalyst for deepening and widening philosophical efforts to better understand the complexities of racisms and, through such insights, develop resources for combating them.The journal and indeed the neologism, critical philosophy of race, emerged thanks to the hard work of Robert Bernasconi, who has not only contributed to the field through his research but also through his dedication to this journal and his role in ensuring that the Penn State Department of Philosophy would be a leader in training graduate students in this field. The success of his efforts was recognized by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which awarded a grant to the department in recognition of its work in mentoring and recruiting philosophy students of color. While no one person is ever fully responsible for transforming a field or a department, it takes vision and hard work to inspire others to work together to achieve these important goals.The conference was originally designed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the journal and to mark the completion of the grant awarded to the philosophy department by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and all that the department was able to achieve thanks to their generous support. With the passing of Charles Mills just six months prior to the conference, we added a session to commemorate his many contributions to critical philosophy of race—to the journal, to the field, and to many of us who benefited from his wisdom and humor. Mills’s research focused on the issue of racial justice and examined the reasons why the subject has been so little addressed in Western political philosophy. He saw his task as furthering “the project of unwhitening mainstream political philosophy by bringing issues of race and racial justice into the conversation.”2 While the invited article by Linda Martín Alcoff was written to celebrate the importance of Mills’s scholarship, many of the articles in this special issue reflect the influence and importance of his work in the field of critical philosophy of race.The journal and the work of the Critical Philosophy of Race Initiative is supported by the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute.

Some authors have called for increased research on various forms of geoengineering as a means to address global climate change. This paper focuses on the question of whether a particular form of geoengineering, namely deploying sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to counteract some of the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, would be a just response to climate change. In particular, we examine problems sulfate aerosol geoengineering (SAG) faces in meeting the requirements of distributive, intergenerational, and procedural justice. We argue that SAG faces obstacles to meeting the requirements of all three considered kinds of justice, because its impacts can harm some persons and communities much more than others; it poses serious risks to future generations; and SAG is especially prone to unilateral implementation. While we do not claim that SAG ought not to be implemented, we argue that it is the responsibility of proponents of SAG to recognize and address these ethical obstacles before advocating its implementation.

People around the world seek climate risk information to guide their decisions. For instance, projections about future flood risk inform where households choose to live, how lenders manage credit risks, and which communities receive federal funding. Yet data limitations and fundamental validation challenges raise important concerns about the reliability of such projections. The principles of transparency and reusability help address these concerns by enabling scrutiny of assumptions and methods, development of foundational data and tools, and consistent application of evaluation standards. While there is ongoing debate about how much transparency commercial climate risk services should provide, many expect noncommercial actors to lead the way on operationalizing transparency and reusability to fulfill their knowledge-building role in the climate risk ecosystem. However, despite prominent success stories, we find a substantial gap between principles and practice: Only four percent of the most-cited peer-reviewed climate risk studies in recent years fully share their data and code although this is a widely accepted minimum standard for transparency. We highlight low-cost measures that noncommercial researchers can take now to improve transparency and reusability. We also emphasize that transformative progress requires substantial investment, cross-sector collaboration, and careful consideration of tradeoffs, data rights, and multiple perspectives on equity. We hope this perspective accelerates both immediate actions and longer-term conversations to improve the ability of science to effectively support timely, evidence-based, and sound climate risk management.

The scope of Philosophy in Multiple Voices provides the reader with eight philosophical streams of thought-African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Asian-American, Feminist, Latin-American, Lesbian, Native-American and Queer-that introduce readers to alternative, complex philosophical questions concerning gendered, sexed, racial and ethnic identities, canon formation, and meta-philosophy. The overriding theme of the text is that philosophy is pluralistic in voice, rich in diversity, and ought to valorize democratic intellectual spaces of philosophical engagement

Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference offers a powerful intervention to the field of climate justice scholarship by addressing a neglected aspect of the field of climate justice, namely systemic racisms. Building on the work of Black feminist theorists, the work develops an ecointersectional approach designed to reveal the depth and complexities of racial climates overlooked even in the environmental justice literature. The book’s conception of ecological indifference underscores the disposition of seeing the environment as a resource for human consumption and enjoyment, a resource that is usable, fungible, disposable, and without intrinsic worth or standing. The many examples in the book offer new insights demonstrating that systemic racisms emerge out of and give rise to environmental degradation; that is, they are often mutually constitutive. The ecointersectional analyses provided throughout the book reveal that ecological indifference and climate injustice are two sides of the same coin. Three distinctive but interrelated domains in which the intersections between systemic racisms and ecological indifference are manifest are identified: (1) differential distribution of harms/benefits due to systemic racisms, (2) racist institutions and practices fueling or causing environmental degradation, and (3) the basic social structures that generate environmental degradation being the same ones that generate systemic oppression of certain groups of people. One of the aims of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference is to underscore that any effort to protect the environment must also be a fight against systemic racisms and other forms of systemic inequity.

Revealing Male Bodies is the first scholarly collection to directly confront male lived experience. There has been an explosion of work in men's studies, masculinity issues, and male sexuality, in addition to a growing literature exploring female embodiment. Missing from the current literature, however, is a sustained analysis of the phenomenology of male-gendered bodies. Revealing Male Bodies addresses this omission by examining how male bodies are physically and experientially constituted by the economic, theoretical, and social practices in which men are immersed. Contributors include Susan Bordo, William Cowling, Terry Goldie, Maurice Hamington, Don Ihde, Greg Johnson, Björn Krondorfer, Alphonso Lingis, Patrick McGann, Paul McIlvenny, Terrance MacMullan, Jim Perkinson, Steven P. Schacht, Richard Schmitt, Nancy Tuana, Craig L. Wilkins, and John Zuern.

Concerns about the risks of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions are growing. At the same time, confidence that international policy agreements will succeed in considerably lowering anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is declining. Perhaps as a result, various geoengineering solutions are gaining attention and credibility as a way to manage climate change. Serious consideration is currently being given to proposals to cool the planet through solar-radiation management. Here we analyze how the unique and nontrivial risks of geoengineering strategies pose fundamental questions at the interface between science and ethics. To illustrate the importance of integrated ethical and scientific analysis, we define key open questions and outline a coupled scientific-ethical research agenda to analyze solar-radiation management geoengineering proposals. We identify nine key fields of coupled research including whether solar-radiation management can be tested, how quickly learning could occur, normative decisions embedded in how different climate trajectories are valued, and justice issues regarding distribution of the harms and benefits of geoengineering. To ensure that ethical analyses are coupled with scientific analyses of this form of geoengineering, we advocate that funding agencies recognize the essential nature of this coupled research by establishing an Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program for solar-radiation management.