Ann Cudd

This paper is about teaching progressive ideas where fundamentalist and conservative views are prominent among the students. I take up two questions: What should we take our task as feminist teachers to be? How should it be carried out? I explore three teaching strategies that a progressive teacher might use in a hostile conservative climate: the whole truth strategy, the dismissal strategy, and the bridge strategy. I reject the first two of these and argue that the third is most likely to be effective and also best exemplifies the value of academic freedom.

This work offers a timely philosophical analysis of interrelated normative questions concerning immigration and citizenship in relation to the global context of multiple nation states. In it, philosophers and scholars from the social sciences address both fundamental questions in moral and political philosophy as well as specific issues concerning policy. Topics covered in this volume include: the concept and the role of citizenship, the equal rights and representation of citizens, general moral frameworks for addressing immigration issues, the duty to obey immigration law, the use of ethnic, cultural, or linguistic criteria for selective immigration, domestic violence as grounds for political asylum, and our duty to refugees in general. The urgency of the need to discuss these matters is clear. Several humanitarian crises involving human migration across national boundaries stemming from war, economic devastations, gang violence, and violence in ethnic or religious conflicts have unfolded. Political debates concerning immigration and immigrant communities are continuing in many countries, especially during election years. While there have always been migrating human beings, they raise distinctive issues in the modern era because of the political context under which the migrations take place, namely, that of a system of sovereign nation states with rights to control their borders and determine their memberships. This collection provides readers the opportunity to parse these complex issues with the help of diverse philosophical, moral, and political perspectives.

Virginia Held argues that feminism has a distinct contribution to make to morality, one that will transform theory and society by beginning from the experiences of women and children. Her main thesis is that the mother-child relation should be taken as the primary moral relation and the model, at least initially, for all other relations in society. She spends the first four of the ten chapters of this book arguing for the distinctness of feminist moral theory; then chapters 5-7, chapter 10, and the epilogue discussing the difference that taking the mother-child relationship as the paradigm for morality would make to theory and society; chapters 8 and 9 criticizing what she takes to be her major nonfeminist competitors, especially contractualist liberal theory. Regrettably, none of these projects are, I think, particularly successful or enlightening in their failure.

Postcolonial feminist scholars have described some Western feminist activism as imperialistic, drawing a comparison to the work of Christian missionaries from the West, who aided in the project of colonization and assimilation of non-Western cultures to Western ideas and practices. This comparison challenges feminists who advocate global human rights ideals or objective appraisals of social practices, in effect charging them with neocolonialism. This essay defends work on behalf of universal human rights, while granting that activists should recognize their limitations in local cultural knowledge

Postcolonial feminist scholars have described some Western feminist activism as imperialistic, drawing a comparison to the work of Christian missionaries from the West, who aided in the project of colonization and assimilation of non-Western cultures to Western ideas and practices. This comparison challenges feminists who advocate global human rights ideals or objective appraisals of social practices, in effect charging them with neocolonialism. This essay defends work on behalf of universal human rights, while granting that activists should recognize their limitations in local cultural knowledge.

The dissertation examines the concept and current theory of common knowledge, with special emphasis on its significance for interaction. I begin by examining the rational choice theory of interaction more broadly, arguing for specific desiderata of the model. I then discuss the current rational choice model of interaction, which is non-cooperative game theory, and argue that common knowledge is an essential assumption on which game theoretic explanations of interaction hinge. Game theory's account of common knowledge, which stems from Lewis' Convention, is that common knowledge among rational agents involves a potentially infinite series of implicitly held mutual beliefs: we all know x, we all know that we know x, we all know that we know that we know x,$\...$ This account I call 'common knowledge*.' ;I advance two main objections to common knowledge*. First, common knowledge* cannot be 'bootstrapped.' That is, it always takes common knowledge* to get further common knowledge*. Second, I show that this account of common knowledge relies on the assumption, which I argue is untenable, that rationality entails common knowledge* of the possible states of the world. ;The theory of common knowledge developed by Lewis and the game theorists is attractive because it allows us to explain conventions and solutions to noncooperative games as individually rational. Furthermore, this model of interaction is a deductive model; one can deduce the rational course of action given the required inputs. However, without the common knowledge* assumption, the model can no longer be deductive. I also argue that a type of frame problem inevitably arises in a deductive model of interaction. I sketch an alternative, commonsense theory of common knowledge, which takes conventional behavior as primitive in explaining common knowledge, thus turning Lewis' view on its head. I tell a story to illustrate how the commonsense theory can be bootstrapped. I then suggest a program for building an inductive model of rational interaction