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10. Iakovos Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue in Plato Iakovos Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue in Plato (pp. 796-800)In John Hawthorne (ed.), Ethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2004.
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7Subjectivity and emotionIn Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 195-210. 2004.
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18Letters to the EditorProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 (1). 1986.
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38Social Connections, Social Contributions, and Why They Matter: Comments on Being Sure of Each OtherCriminal Law and Philosophy 17 (2): 453-462. 2023.
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132On Being Content with ImperfectionEthics 127 (2): 327-352. 2017.The aim of this essay is to work out an account of contentment as a response to imperfect conditions and to argue that a disposition to contentment, understood as a disposition to appreciate the goods in one's present condition and to use expectations that enable such appreciation, is a virtue. In the first half, I lay out an analysis of what contentment and discontentment are. In the second half, I argue that contentment is a virtue of appreciation and respond to skeptical concerns about recomm…Read more
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99XI—Responsibilities and Taking on ResponsibilityProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119 (3): 231-251. 2019.There is a familiar, everyday notion of a responsibility. Much of daily life on and off the job is consumed by taking care of responsibilities in this sense. But what is a responsibility, and how are responsibilities related to obligations? Reflection on the phenomenon of taking on responsibilities suggests that the concept of ‘a responsibility’ is distinct from that of ‘an obligation’, and that not all responsibilities are also obligations, even though many are.
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5Review of: Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (review)Theoretical Medicine: An International Journal for the Philosophy and Methodology of Medical Research and Practice 4 329-332. 1983.Last updated - 2020-01-06.
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47A Question of ObligationJournal of Applied Philosophy 37 (1): 44-50. 2020.This essay engages with Sarah Buss's 2019 annual lecture for the Society for Applied Philosophy: "Some Musings About the Limits of an Ethics That Can Be Applied – A Response to a Question About Courage and Convictions That Confronted the Author When She Woke Up on November 9, 2016." She reflects on whether one is obligated to take great risks in the face of grave injustice. I suggest shifting the normative question from “Am I obligated?” to “Is there something of moral importance that someone ne…Read more
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94The Undergraduate Pipeline ProblemHypatia 24 (2). 2009.The essay speculates that women's underrepresentation in the philosophy major (though not in lower division philosophy courses) is connected with the clash between the schema for philosophy and the schema for woman. The result is that female students have difficulty envisioning themselves as philosophers and thus have a weaker attachment to the discipline. I also suggest that this schema clash encourages female students to take isolated experiences of sexism or gender imbalance in the classro…Read more
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52Doing Valuable Time considers the interest--and disinterest--we take in our own lives. It explores the nature of meaningful living, the attraction to the future that is lost in depression, the motivating force of hope, the role of commitments, the inevitability of boredom, and the possibilities for contentment with imperfection.
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38Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 125. 1998.Systemic discrimination produces individuals with a degraded self-concept who therefore may not care about autonomy or set ends compatible with human flourishing. Under systemic discrimination, the dominant conceptual and evaluative framework does not enable the oppressed to articulate their humanity or the rationality of aspiring to full human flourishing. And the injustice of that system may be fully visible only from a perspective outside of that system.
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23Moral Repair (review)Dialogue 46 (4): 819-823. 2007.This is a review of Margaret Urban Walker's book, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
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1Civilized Oppression (review)Dialogue 40 (4): 845-847. 2001.Lynching, arbitrary imprisonment, and police brutality are uncivilized forms of oppression that cause obvious, measurable harms. Exercised through physical violence or unjust legal action, uncivilized oppression expresses ill will toward vulnerable individuals and blatantly misuses power. Civilized oppression, by contrast, takes place in routine, socially accepted institutional and intimate relationships between people. Civilized oppression may cause no obvious harms, may be motivated by good in…Read more
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58The Humean Moral Sentiment: A Unique FeelingSouthwestern Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 69-78. 1980.
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20Book Reviews:Why Privacy Isn't Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability (review)Ethics 118 (2): 324-327. 2008.
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50The Gender Closet: Lesbian Disappearance under the Sign "Women"Feminist Studies 21 (1): 7. 1995.Can one theorize the lesbian within a feminist frame? I argue that a difference sensitive feminist frame closets lesbians because (1) heterosexist oppression has been under-theorized and thus gender analyses fail to intersect with sexual orientation analyses, (2) feminist values and goals have worked against representing lesbian difference from heterosexual women, and (3) difference sensitive feminism requires that lesbians be representable as women with a different sexuality and not as a “th…Read more
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48Precluded InterestsHypatia 30 (2): 475-485. 2015.This essay contributes to the explanatory hypotheses for why women persistently make up a third or fewer of all undergraduate philosophy majors in the United States. Following a suggestion of Tom Dougherty, Samuel Baron, and Kristie Miller, the essay first examines what women undergraduates do major in, why they might prefer these subjects to philosophy, and how departments might make philosophy more attractive. Second, the essay explores the relevance to philosophy of Sapna Cheryan’s work on t…Read more
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86Kant and Compliance With Conventionalized InjusticeSouthern Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 135-159. 1994.Kant's Categorical Imperative reveals the injustice of excepting ourselves from conventional social practices like promise keeping. But can it equally reveal the injustice of complying with societally entrenched unjust maxims, e.g., slave-holding maxims in colonial America? Standard Kantian arguments against slavery depend on overly narrow definitions of slavery and an implausible requirement that we universalization across all rational beings. This essay reconstructs the CI-procedure so that it…Read more
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24Civilized Oppression Jean Harvey Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, ix + 155 pp., $59.50, $18.95 paper (review)Dialogue 40 (4): 845-. 2001.
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131What is an emotion?: classic readings in philosophical psychology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1984.This volume draws together important selections from the rich history of theories and debates about emotion. Utilizing sources from a variety of subject areas including philosophy, psychology, and biology, the editors provide an illuminating look at the "affective" side of psychology and philosophy from the perspective of the world's great thinkers. Part One features classic readings from Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume. Part Two, entitled "The Meeting of Philosophy and Psychology," samp…Read more
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407An apology for moral shameJournal of Political Philosophy 12 (2). 2004.Making a place for shame in the mature moral agent’s psychology would seem to depend on reconciling the agent’s vulnerability to shame with her capacity for autonomous judgment. The standard strategy is to argue that mature agents are only shamed before themselves or before those whose evaluative judgments mirror their own. Because this strategy forces us to discount as irrational or immature many everyday experiences of shame, including the shame felt by members of subordinate groups, this chap…Read more
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116Setting the moral compass: essays by women philosophersOxford University Press. 2004.Setting the Moral Compass brings together the (largely unpublished) work of nineteen women moral philosophers whose powerful and innovative work has contributed to the "re-setting of the compass" of moral philosophy over the past two decades. The contributors, who include many of the top names in this field, tackle several wide-ranging projects: they develop an ethics for ordinary life and vulnerable persons; they examine the question of what we ought to do for each other; they highlight the mor…Read more
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62Reflections on the Metavirtue of Sensitivity to SufferingHypatia 23 (3): 182-188. 2008.One of Lisa Tessman's central claims in Burdened Virtue: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (OUP, 2005) is that virtue is much less reliably connected to flourishing than Aristotle imagined and might in fact impede flourishing under nonideal conditions. The central burdened virtue is the meta-virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering. I raise two critical questions about this meta-virtue. First, does this meta-virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering, as Tessman understands this virtue, h…Read more
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Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious StudiesRetired faculty
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |