-
89Janet Farrell Smith, 1941-2009Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 82 (5). 2009.
-
17Cannon, WB, 297 Caraka. 41, 67,280 Carroll, Noel, 15 Chisholm, Roderick M., 15 Chrysippus the Stoic, 9In Roger Ames, Robert C. Solomon & Joel Marks (eds.), Emotions in Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy, Suny Press. 1995.
-
20Race and K-12 EducationIn Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, Oxford University Press Usa. 2017.Different socioeconomic backgrounds and barriers to education have contributed to lower educational achievement among blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, compared to American whites and Asians. The failure of legal integration to close the racial achievement gap is the result of prejudice on the part of teachers, as well as a scarcity of culturally relevant curricula materials for nonwhite children. As a plausible solution to these problems, recent studies show that poor children do better…Read more
-
18A Moral Account of Empathy and Fellow FeelingIn Neil Roughley & Thomas Schramme (eds.), Forms of Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency, Cambridge University Press. pp. 142-162. 2017.
-
16"Iris Murdoch"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022.Covers Murdoch’s moral philosophy; trajectory and reception; critique of implicit view of self in Hare and Sartre; her Platonic moral realism; moral reality as other persons; essentiality of metaphysics; morality and the self/other framework; inescapability of metaphor; moral agency as inner activity; the fabric of the agent’s moral being; seeing replacing doing; influence of Simone Weil; attention (connected to care ethics, feminism, particularism); obstacles to loving attention; Freudian moral…Read more
-
107One-to-One Fellow-Feeling, Universal Identification and Oneness, and Group SolidaritiesIn Philip J. Ivanhoe, Owen Flanagan, Victoria S. Harrison, Hagop Sarkissian & Eric Schwitzgebel (eds.), The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self, Columbia University Press. pp. 106-119. 2018.Unusual among Western philosophers, Schopenhauer explicitly drew on Hindu and especially Buddhist traditions inhis moral philosophy. He saw plurality, especially the plurality of human persons, as a kind of illusion; in reality all is one, and compassionate acts express an implicit recognition of this oneness. Max Scheler retains the transcendence of self aspect of compassion but emphasizes that the subject must have a clear, lived sense of herself as a distinct individual in order for that tran…Read more
-
139Murdoch and PoliticsIn Silvia Caprioglio Panizza & Mark Hopwood (eds.), The Murdochian Mind, Routledge. 2022.Politics never became a central intellectual interest of Murdoch’s, but she produced one important and visionary political essay in the ‘50’s, several popular writings on political matters, and a significant chapter in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that echoes throughout that book. In the 1958 “House of Theory,” she sees the welfare state as having almost entirely failed to address the deeper problems of capitalist society, including a failure to create the conditions for values she saw as ce…Read more
-
149Integration, Equality, and the Backlash Against Racial Justice Education: Comments on Stitzlein, Glass, and Fraser-BurgessPhilosophy of Education 78 (4): 127-136. 2022.
-
21"I'm Not a Racist, But..."Cornell University Press. 2002.Media, politicians, and individuals often use the term "racism" casually and inaccurately, threatening to strip the concept of its meaning and moral force, argues Blum in "'I'm Not a Racist, But...': The Moral Quandary of Race". Not all racial incidents are racist incidents. Blum asserts that only "certain especially serious moral failings and violations" merit the designation "racism." Discussing various scholarly perspectives on the construction of racial categories, Blum calls for a balance b…Read more
-
34Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Schools (2021)University of Chicago. 2021.The promise of a free, high-quality public education is supposed to guarantee every child a shot at the American dream. But our widely segregated schools mean that many children of color do not have access to educational opportunities equal to those of their white peers. In Integrations, historian Zoë Burkholder and philosopher Lawrence Blum investigate what this country’s long history of school segregation means for achieving just and equitable educational opportunities in the United States. In…Read more
-
21'Black Lives Matter': Moral Frames for Understanding the Police Killings of Black MalesIn Amalia Amaya & Maksymilian Del Mar (eds.), Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Law and Legal Reasoning, Hart Publishing. pp. 121-138. 2020.The Black Lives Matter movement calls attention to the injustice involved in police killings of blacks and implicitly proposes that a particular emotional attitude--caring about the life of a human being not known personally to oneself--should have been, but was not, present in the police officers involves in these killings. I examine five prominent such killings, but especially Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice [the article was written before the killing of George Floyd] for the charac…Read more
-
48Philosophy of education in a new key: Snapshot 2020 from the United States and CanadaEducational Philosophy and Theory 54 (8): 1130-1146. 2022.This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...
-
138Race and Class TogetherAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4): 381-395. 2023.The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of r…Read more
-
6Deceiving, hurting and usingIn Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy and Personal Relations: An Anglo-French Study, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 34-61. 1973.
-
24Personal RelationshipsIn R. G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Personal and Impersonal within “Personal Relationships” Personal Relationships and Morality Ideal Friendship and Morally Good Character Can Immoral People be Friends? Can a Friendless Person Lead a Satisfying and Moral Life? Friendship and the Demands of Impartiality Kierkegaard: Universal Love and Unconditional Love Challenging the Legitimacy of Personal Relationships The Real Moral Conflict between Impartiality and Personal Relationships Misunderstanding …Read more
-
98Friendship, Altruism and MoralityRoutledge. 1980.Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, originally published in 1980, gives an account of "altruistic emotions" and friendship that brings out their moral value. Blum argues that moral theories centered on rationality, universal principle, obligation, and impersonality cannot capture this moral importance. This was one of the first books in contemporary moral philosophy to emphasize the moral significance of emotions, to deal with friendship as a moral phenomenon, and to challenge the rationalism of…Read more
-
164Reflections on Charles MillsRadical Philosophy Review 25 (2): 209-218. 2022.Charles Mills adhered to the highest standards of philosophical scholarship, while seeing his work firmly as a contribution to the cause of social justice. He had a deep appreciation for historical context and a history of ideas approach to racial/philosophical questions. He was one of the foremost Rawls interpreters or our time, though only a few years before his passing was he so recognized. He channeled his analytic training in his habit of demonstrating how a view is strengthened when an aut…Read more
-
29Affirmative Action, Diversity, and Racial Justice: Reflections from a Diverse, Non-elite UniversityPhilosophy of Education 70 233-242. 2016.The “diversity” framework the Supreme Court has imposed on affirmative action weakens its justice import in theory and practice. The increasing alignment of wealth with attendance at selective institutions betokens a diminishing quality of student at those institutions. So some of the perceived advantages of affirmative action rely on an increasingly false sense of the quality differences between more and less highly-ranked institutions. Aligning those rankings with the quality of student (and q…Read more
-
26Class Background, Current Class Position, and Race in Philosophy of Education: Comments on Liz Jackson’s “Becoming Classy”Philosophy of Education 74 329-332. 2018.
-
240Neoliberalism and educationIn Randall R. Curren (ed.), Handbook of philosophy of education, Routledge. pp. 257-269. 2023.Neoliberalism is an approach to social policy, now globally influential, that applies market approaches to all aspects of social life, including education. Charter schools, privately operated but publicly funded, are its most prominent manifestation in the U.S. The neoliberal principles of competition, consumerism, and choice cannot serve as foundations of a sound and equitable public education system. Neoliberalism embraces socio-economic inequality overall and in doing so constricts any justic…Read more
-
291“Cultural Racism”: Biology and Culture in Racist ThoughtJournal of Social Philosophy 54 (3): 350-369. 2023.Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essential…Read more
-
Community and virtueIn Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live?: Essays on the Virtues, Oxford University Press. 1996.
-
10A Truer Liberty (Routledge Revivals): Simone Weil and MarxismRoutledge. 1989.Shows how Simone Weil developed a penetrating critique of Marxism and a powerful political philosophy which serves as an alternative to liberalism and Marxism
-
24Mary G. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil (review)Ethics 101 (1): 196-197. 1990.
-
485Reflections on Brown vs. Board of Education and School Integration TodayThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 26 37-57. 2019.The Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 mandated school integration. The decision also to recognize that inequalities outside the schools, of both a class- and race-based nature, prevent equality in education. Today, the most prominent argument for integration is that disadvantaged students benefit from the financial, social, and cultural “capital” of middle class families when the children attend the same schools. This argument fails to recognize that disadvantaged students contribute…Read more
-
34Mary G. Dietz / Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil. Peter Winch / Simone Weil: "The Just Balance"_ (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1): 246-248. 1992.
-
63Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, & Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (review)Ethics 111 (3): 622-625. 2001.
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |