Shannon Sullivan

Drawing on the work of John Dewey (but addressing non-foundational epistemologies generally), the author argues that if academic philosophers take seriously the claim that theory and practice are reciprocally determined, then they should take seriously the task of intelligently experimenting with teaching practices in order to refine theories of knowledge and, on this basis, improve teaching practices. This paper explores one way of relating non-foundational epistemology to classroom practices. The author elaborates a “transactional” model of knowledge, according to which knowledge is what arises from historically- and contextually-situated agents interacting with each other and the world. One pedagogical application of this model is a “transactional classroom.” Such a classroom employs “Group Inquiry,” a teaching strategy that involves the teacher and students sharing responsibility for the results of inquiry as well as for the development of standards to which inquiry is held. After detailing several courses built on this teaching strategy and offering advice for avoiding a foundationalist position in the classroom, the author addresses criticisms of this teaching method and reflects on its results. With the help of student surveys, the author concludes that while students found these courses demanding, Group Inquiry successfully decentralized the classroom and improved student participation.

This paper outlines the effectiveness of films as a pedagogical tool for teaching philosophy. For the author, a film skillfully explores philosophical issues, capturing students’ attention and providing a setting for discussion. The author focuses on the use of Lars von Trier's Zentropa as a beneficial tool for discussion of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The film adequately illustrates the two positions of the aesthete and the judge, and demonstrates the adverse affects of avoiding choice in one's life. The film can also be useful in an introductory course and a class on existentialism because it attends to the larger philosophical questions of how one should live their life.

While Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty both acknowledge the role that spatiality plays in human life, neither pays any explicit attention to the intersections of race and space. It is Franz Fanon who uses psychoanalysis and phenomenology to provide an account of how the psychical and lived bodily existence of black people is racially constituted by a racist world. More precisely, as I argue in this paper, Fanon's work demonstrates how psychical and bodily spatiality cannot be adequately understood apart from the environing space of the social world. For Fanon, body, psyche, and world mutually influence and constitute each other. In a raced and racist world, therefore, the lived bodily experience and the unconscious of human beings will be racially and racist‐ly constituted as well. This will show you how in psychoanalysis we take spatial ways of looking at things seriously. Sigmund Freud1 Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” in volume 20 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 195. Everything throws us back on to the organic relations between subject and space, to that gearing of the subject onto his world which is the origin of space. Maurice Merleau‐Ponty2 Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), 251. Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a [neurotic] taint, it lies not in the “soul” of the individual but rather in that of the environment. Franz Fanon3 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 213.

Chapter 4 demonstrates how white domination helps constitute the bodies of white people, focusing on white people’s stomachs and hearts in particular. Returning to the example of undergraduate student Brittney from the book’s Introduction, this chapter locates unconscious habits of white privilege in the clenching muscles of white people’s stomachs. It also argues that white people’s relatively good cardio health should be viewed a physiological effect of white privilege, rather than as a neutral or normal health condition. In the case of both white stomachs and white hearts, a racialized knowledge grounded in white ignorance helps structure contemporary white physiology.

This chapter examines non-genetic, psychophysiological inheritance across generational lines in the context of white domination. Focusing on the effects of racism in black bodies, this chapter draws on the field of epigenetics to show how people of color can biologically inherit the deleterious effects of racism. Examining disparities in preterm birth rates between African American and white women, Chapter 3 details how transgenerational racial health disparities are in fact racist health disparities that can be manifest physiologically, helping constitute the chemicals, hormones, cells, and fibers of the human body. Epigenetics helps demonstrate how racism can have durable effects on the biological constitution of human beings that are not limited to the specific person who is the target of racism, but instead extend to that person’s children and grandchildren. In this way, the field of epigenetics can help philosophers and others understand the transgenerational biological impact of social forces such as racism.

This chapter introduces the book by arguing that feminist and critical philosophy of race need to engage more robustly with the medical and biological sciences. It explains physiological habits as transactional, that is, as co-constituted in a dynamic relationship with the social-political world. It also argues that both race and sex/gender are biological, but not in the pre-critical sense of static, essential categories. Rather, they are biological in the critical, dynamic way in which they become biological through the embodiment of racial inequalities. As the book demonstrates, sexism and racism have put down some of their toughest roots in the physiological habits of human bodies, and thus it is there that feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race also must work.

Responding to Silvia Stoller's comments on “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception”, I argue that while phenomenology has much to offer feminism, feminists should be wary of Merleau-Ponty's notion of projective intentionality because of the ethical solipsism that it tends to involve. I also take the opportunity to clarify the concept of hypothetical construction introduced in the earlier paper, in particular the transformative relationship that it has to pre-reflective experience.

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of "dialogue" with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called "hypothetical construction," in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of the differences of others

Against the backdrop of eliminitivist versus critical conservationist approaches to the racial category of whiteness, this article asks whether a rehabilitated version of whiteness can be worked out concretely. What might a non-oppressive, anti-racist whiteness look like? Turning to Josiah Royce’s “Provincialism” for help answering this question, I show that even though the essay never explicitly discusses race, it can help explain the ongoing need for the category of whiteness and implicitly offers a wealth of useful suggestions for how to transform it. “Provincialism” is an exercise in critical conservation of the concept of provincialism, and while not identical, provincialism and whiteness share enough in common that “wise” provincialism can serve as a model for “wise” whiteness. Royce’s concept of provincialism thus can be a great help to critical philosophers of race wrestling with questions of whether and how to transformatively conserve whiteness. Exploring similarities and differences between wise provincialism and wise whiteness, I use Royce’s analyses of provincialism to shed light on why whiteness should be rehabilitated rather than discarded and how white people today might begin living whiteness as an anti-racist category.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismShannon SullivanWhite people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.—James Baldwin, The Fire Next TimeIn his classic manifesto on race, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin passionately urges black people not to retaliate against white people by attempting to debase or dominate them in return. The reason is that doing so would harm black people most of all. As Baldwin (1963, 113) assures his readers,I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads.... I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.Likewise, when Martin Luther King Jr., urged his black church members to love their white enemies rather than return their racial hate, he did so because he believed that “hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the [End Page 21] individual who hates” (King 1957). While Baldwin was an avowed atheist and King a Christian minister, both warned of the devastating effects of white racism on “the souls of white folk,” and they pleaded and preached that black people should not stoop to white people’s debased level.1 Out of all the damage that white racism has done to African Americans and other people of color, the most damaging of all would be for it to turn them into the debilitated, deplorable people that white folk generally are.We might say that on Baldwin’s (and perhaps also King’s) view, white people are the truly “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1965). It has been argued that white racism has cost white people their capability for intimacy, their affective lives, their authenticity, their sense of connection to other people, and their spiritual selves (Segrest 2001, 65). These claims are not an attempt to trump or erase the enormous physical, psychological, economic, spiritual, and other types of pain that white people have caused people of color around the world. They instead are a recognition that white people’s attempts to gain material riches and political power through the domination of people of color have impoverished and depleted their own souls. White people qua white are ill in that their racial habits largely have been built out of greed, hatred, jealousy, fear, and cruelty. Their psychosomatic health has suffered and continues to suffer because of their toxic racial identities.So much the worse for white people, we might think. But although understandable, this response would be misguided since white people’s psychosomatic depletion has implications for the well-being of others. Put succinctly, white people’s unhealthiness helps fuel their abuse and domination of people of color. It thus matters to struggles for racial justice whether white people are psychosomatically healthy and strong. It matters which affects, emotions, and passions fund white people’s actions in general, and their work for racial justice in particular. In this paper, I will draw from Friedrich Nietzsche, Teresa Brennan, and other scholars to explain the ontological and power-full aspects of affect, touching briefly on the toxicity of white guilt and shame and focusing especially on the healthiness of what Nietzsche calls a bestowing self-love. I will argue that in the context of white people’s contributions to racial justice movements, a positive effect of their bestowing self-love is that white people will be more likely and better able to clean up their own house...