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63Not Giving Up on People: A Feminist Case for Prison AbolitionRowman & Littlefield. 2023.Feminist philosophers Barrett Emerick and Audrey Yap bring theoretical arguments about personhood and moral repair into conversation with the work of activists and the experiences of incarcerated people to make the case that prisons ought to be abolished. They argue that contemporary carceral systems in the United States and Canada fail to treat people as genuine moral agents in ways that also fail victims and their larger communities. Such carceral systems are a form of what Emerick and Yap cal…Read more
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Ad Hominem Fallacies and Epistemic CredibilityIn Christian Dahlman & Thomas Bustamante (eds.), Argument Types and Fallacies in Legal Argumentation, Imprint: Springer
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612Not Giving Up on Zuko: Relational Identity and the Stories We TellIn Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt (eds.), Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy: Wisdom From Aang to Zuko, Wiley-blackwell. 2022.Everyone thinks they know who Prince Zuko is and can be. His father, Fire Lord Ozai, and sister, Azula, think him weak, disobedient, and undeserving of the crown. His Uncle Iroh thinks him good, if troubled, but ultimately worthy of his faith. The kids initially think him a villain, but eventually come to see him as a person – neither monster nor saint – someone who can choose to go in a new way. Zuko himself shows great ambivalence between these conflicting stories about who he is, though each …Read more
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200Sexual Violence and Carceral LogicIn Barrett Emerick & Audrey Yap (eds.), Not Giving Up on People: A Feminist Case for Prison Abolition, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 57-80. 2023.
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192Not Giving UpIn Barrett Emerick & Audrey Yap (eds.), Not Giving Up on People: A Feminist Case for Prison Abolition, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 161-176. 2023.
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214Betrayed Expectations: Misdirected Anger and the Preservation of IdeologyJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (3): 352-370. 2023.This paper explores a phenomenon that we call “justified-but-misdirected anger,” in which one’s anger is grounded in or born from a genuine wrong or injustice but is directed towards an inappropriate target. In particular, we argue that oppressive ideologies that maintain systems of gender, race, and class encourage such misdirection and are thereby self-perpetuating. We engage with two particular examples of such misdirection. The first includes poor white voters who embrace racist and xenophob…Read more
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128Weapon and ShieldFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 9 (3). 2023.Apologies are an important part of moral life and a method by which someone can satisfy their reparative obligations. At the same time, apologies can be used both as a shield to protect the person apologizing and as a weapon against the person to whom the apology is owed. In this paper we unpack both claims. We defend two principles one should employ to try to avoid such bad outcomes: (1) Apologies must be one-sided and nontransactional, and (2) the wrongdoer must be willing to pay what they owe…Read more
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13Not Giving Up on ZukoIn Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt (eds.), Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy: Wisdom From Aang to Zuko, Wiley-blackwell. 2022.This chapter talks about the role that others play in who we are as people. Someone's identity who they are as an individual is formed of what philosopher Hilde Lindemann called a “connective tissue of narratives,” all woven together around important values, relationships, projects, and experiences. Lindemann's account of personhood is grounded in the idea that we are fundamentally social beings, always becoming who we are via relationships with others. The work of holding each other in their id…Read more
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516Defensiveness and IdentityJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1-20. 2023.Criticism can sometimes provoke defensive reactions, particularly when it implicates identities people hold dear. For instance, feminists told they are upholding rape culture might become angry or upset, since the criticism conflicts with an identity that is important to them. These kinds of defensive reactions are a primary focus of this paper. What is it to be defensive in this way, and why do some kinds of criticism, or implied criticism, tend to provoke this kind of response? What are the co…Read more
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87Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne (review)Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29 (1): 10-17. 2019.Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an accessible and timely exploration of a particular aspect of gendered oppression that has received surprisingly little scholarly treatment. There is a lot of feminist work on sexism, oppression, and patriarchy, but misogyny, as Manne defines it, is distinct from all of these. Her purpose in this book is to describe misogyny as a distinct force present in contemporary society, and to show how it shapes public life. The strength of Manne’s account…Read more
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53Logical structuralism and Benacerraf’s problemSynthese 171 (1): 157-173. 2009.There are two general questions which many views in the philosophy of mathematics can be seen as addressing: what are mathematical objects, and how do we have knowledge of them? Naturally, the answers given to these questions are linked, since whatever account we give of how we have knowledge of mathematical objects surely has to take into account what sorts of things we claim they are; conversely, whatever account we give of the nature of mathematical objects must be accompanied by a correspond…Read more
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62Conceptual Engineering and Neurath’s Boat: A Return to the Political Roots of Logical EmpiricismIn David Bordonaba Plou, Víctor Fernández Castro & José Ramón Torices (eds.), The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression, De Gruyter. pp. 31-52. 2022.
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58Argumentation, Adversariality, and Social NormsMetaphilosophy 51 (5): 747-765. 2020.Janice Moulton's “The Adversary Method: A Philosophical Paradigm” articulated several criticisms of the popular idea of philosophy as adversarial debate. Moulton criticizes it on epistemic grounds, arguing that philosophy's overreliance on adversarial debate is to the detriment of its goals. Some, notably Trudy Govier, have argued in favor of at least a minimal adversariality, governed by norms of respectful argumentation. This paper suggests that Govier's faith in these norms is misplaced, beca…Read more
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39Stephen Pollard. A Mathematical Prelude to the Philosophy of Mathematics. Springer, 2014. ISBN: 978-3-319-05815-3 ; 978-3-319-05816-0 . Pp. xi + 202 (review)Philosophia Mathematica 24 (2): 275-277. 2016.
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168Idealization, epistemic logic, and epistemologySynthese 191 (14): 3351-3366. 2014.Many criticisms of epistemic logic have centered around its use of devices such as idealized knowers with logical omniscience and perfect self-knowledge. One possible response to such criticisms is to say that these idealizations are normative devices, and that epistemic logic tells us how agents ought to behave. This paper will take a different approach, treating epistemic logic as descriptive, and drawing the analogy between its formal models and idealized scientific models on that basis. Trea…Read more
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27Argument Types and Fallacies in Legal Argumentation (edited book)Imprint: SpringerThis book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To e…Read more
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15Games: Agency as Art, by Nguyen Thi, Oxford University Press, 2020Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (3): 411-414. 2022.
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132Dynamic epistemic logic with branching temporal structuresSynthese 169 (2). 2009.van Bentham et al. (Merging frameworks for interaction: DEL and ETL, 2007) provides a framework for generating the models of Epistemic Temporal Logic ( ETL : Fagin et al., Reasoning about knowledge, 1995; Parikh and Ramanujam, Journal of Logic, Language, and Information, 2003) from the models of Dynamic Epistemic Logic ( DEL : Baltag et al., in: Gilboa (ed.) Tark 1998, 1998; Gerbrandy, Bisimulations on Planet Kripke, 1999). We consider the logic TDEL on the merged semantic framework, and its ext…Read more
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Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann, eds., The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (review)Philosophy in Review 27 (3): 170. 2007.
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53Predicativity and Structuralism in Dedekind’s Construction of the RealsErkenntnis 71 (2): 157-173. 2009.It is a commonly held view that Dedekind's construction of the real numbers is impredicative. This naturally raises the question of whether this impredicativity is justified by some kind of Platonism about sets. But when we look more closely at Dedekind's philosophical views, his ontology does not look Platonist at all. So how is his construction justified? There are two aspects of the solution: one is to look more closely at his methodological views, and in particular, the places in which predi…Read more
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81Throwing Like a Girl: Martial Arts and Norms of Feminine Body ComportmentInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9 (2): 92-114. 2016.Although women have long been participants in martial arts and other contact sports, the introduction of a women’s division in the Ultimate Fighting Challenge in 2012 brought women in combat sports into the media spotlight in an arguably unprecedented way. Yet, the increasing acceptance of women’s participation in combat sports does not necessarily mean that these sports are equally accessible to people of all genders. This article, extending insights from Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Gi…Read more
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55Feminism and Carnap's Principle of ToleranceHypatia 25 (2): 437-454. 2010.The logical empiricists often appear as a foil for feminist theories. Their emphasis on the individualistic nature of knowledge and on the value-neutrality of science seems directly opposed to most feminist concerns. However, several recent works have highlighted aspects of Carnap's views that make him seem like much less of a straightforwardly positivist thinker. Certain of these aspects lend themselves to feminist concerns much more than the stereotypical picture would imply.
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273Ad Hominem Fallacies, Bias, and TestimonyArgumentation 27 (2): 97-109. 2013.An ad hominem fallacy is committed when an individual employs an irrelevant personal attack against an opponent instead of addressing that opponent’s argument. Many discussions of such fallacies discuss judgments of relevance about such personal attacks, and consider how we might distinguish those that are relevant from those that are not. This paper will argue that the literature on bias and testimony can helpfully contribute to that analysis. This will highlight ways in which biases, particula…Read more
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128Feminist Radical Empiricism, Values, and EvidenceHypatia 31 (1): 58-73. 2016.Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism. I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just w…Read more
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1Conceptualizing consent: hermeneutical injustice and epistemic resourcesIn Benjamin R. Sherman & Stacey Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
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54Gauss' quadratic reciprocity theorem and mathematical fruitfulnessStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (3): 410-415. 2011.
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47Dedekind and Cassirer on Mathematical Concept Formation†Philosophia Mathematica 25 (3): 369-389. 2014.Dedekind's major work on the foundations of arithmetic employs several techniques that have left him open to charges of psychologism, and through this, to worries about the objectivity of the natural-number concept he defines. While I accept that Dedekind takes the foundation for arithmetic to lie in certain mental powers, I will also argue that, given an appropriate philosophical background, this need not make numbers into subjective mental objects. Even though Dedekind himself did not provide …Read more
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359Hidden Costs of Inquiry: Exploitation, World-Travelling and Marginalized LivesKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 31 (2): 153-173. 2021.There are many good reasons to learn about the lives of people who have less social privilege than we do. We might want to understand their circumstances in order to have informed opinions on social policy, or to make our institutions more inclusive. We might also want to cultivate empathy for its own sake. Much of this knowledge is gained through social scientific or humanistic research into others' lives. The entitlement to theorize about or study the lives of marginalized others is often gran…Read more
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University of VictoriaRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Feminist Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Feminist Philosophy |