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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The problem of this dissertation is first to examine the form and the rationale for pluralism in the social philosophy of John Dewey; second, to inspect the adequacy of this rationale; and third, to see whether the social philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet provides a supplementation of Dewey's view. In this examination, pluralism is seen as that form of society in which differences are both maintained and unified. Thus pluralism is found as a mean existing somewhere between individualism which is the assertion of differences and absolutism which, as Dewey sees it, is the assertion of the unity. The examination of ground and difference is concerned with that in virtue of which differences may be said to constitute a society. Because pluralism is an attempt to maintain a balance between individualism and absolutism, the dissertation undertakes an examination of Dewey's criticism of both these extremes. It sees in this critique a rejection of social theories which attempt to restrict differences by pre-determining for a person both his nature and his social role. The critique applies especially well to absolutism with its limited categories. Individualism arises as a reaction to absolutism and to the failure of absolutism in social theory to accommodate various social and environmental changes. Yet, for Dewey, individualism is an overreaction. It abstracts a person from the specific social situations in which he is found and thus attempts to state the nature of individuals as such prior to examining the nature of specific individuals in specific situations. After examining Dewey's critique of absolutism and individualism, the dissertation considers Dewey's own social theory. Here it analyzes the social nature of the whole-part relationship as Dewey sees it, and describes the way in which a person is determined by his group memberships as well as the way in which individual differences may be supported or retarded by these memberships. Included in this treatment is an examination of the role of the state as it arises to control the indirect consequences of acts, i.e. to protect the interest of those who, while not the agents of an act, do suffer some of its consequences. The dissertation points out that the state, as such, has, for Dewey, no normative connotation. It becomes a good state when those affected in this way i.e. the public are organized and thus are able to participate in controlling these consequences. / 2031-01-01

The dissertation takes as its central problem the priority and value of nonviolent and pragmatic social epistemology. Many concede the desirability of nonviolent problem solving, but quickly and unreflectively assent to violence when the imagination fails to procure viable alternatives. Moreover, the kind and quality of knowledge gained through the use of nonviolence, it is argued, is far superior to the kind and quality of knowledge gained through the use of violence. This dissertation attempts to settle the discussion of the priority and value of nonviolence as a social epistemology by arguing for, and ultimately proving with the use of rationale and empirical evidence, that pragmatic nonviolence has more social-epistemological and/or value as knowledge than the available violent alternatives. Neither modern nor post-modern violence are able to produce knowledge with quite the same staying power, lasting effects, and high quality than that which is generated through what I call "pragmatic nonviolence." Traditionally, for a variety of biased reasons, classical American pragmatism has not taken a stand for either philosophical or methodological nonviolence. This unfortunate situation will, I hope, change with the argument in this dissertation. The issue of whether or not the social-epistemological value of pragmatic nonviolence, as a philosophical movement, has the potential to steer the course of contemporary social, political, and moral pragmatism into the 21st century, has largely been settled. The discussion and analysis offered in chapter one focuses primarily on the logic of domination, violent knowing, and violent realism. Historical context is provided to situate the central problems, compare sources of knowledge, and explore the relationship between violence and knowledge. The views of Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, The United States Military Academy, Wendy Hamblet, Crispin Sartwell, Judith Bradford, and Aaron Fortune receive primary attention in chapter one. Chapter two focuses primarily on the development of a radically empirical social epistemology and theory of concept formation. I examine the roots of social epistemology and describe the problem of learning theory and concept formation through notions of habit, conduct, and struggle. The views of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Leonard Harris receive attention in this section of chapter two. I conclude this chapter by outlining concepts of peace and social justice as they demonstrate how social knowledge is created pragmatically. The views of Martin Luther King, Jr., Duane Cady, and Steven Lee receive attention in the latter section of chapter two. The analysis offered in chapter three centers on what I claim generates better knowledge: pragmatic nonviolence. The first section of chapter three describes the kind of normative epistemology I advocate and how pragmatic nonviolence offers qualitatively better knowledge than the alternatives. The views of C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and Edgar Sheffield Brightman are considered in this section. The second section details the extent and value of uniting pragmatism and nonviolence, the need for a distinctly pragmatic conception of nonviolence, prophetic pragmatism, and American personalism. The views of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cornel West, and Randall Auxier are treated in this part. The third and fourth sections of chapter three applies the theories advanced in previous sections and chapters to demonstrate how pragmatic nonviolence generates better knowledge. The views of Myles Horton and Bob Moses are considered at length.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The central aim of this dissertation is to inquire whether there is any one concern or end that Karl Popper regards as primary and therefore binding for all areas of human endeavor. Attention centers upon his conjecture and refutation methodology for theoretical empirical science (Chapter I), his methodologies for theoretical and technological social science (Chapter II), and his social philosophy (Chapter III). The thesis of the dissertation is that Popper does subscribe to an ultimate concern, namely, the preservation and furthering of rationalism. Furthermore, that the means Popper stipulates for the realization of this end would inhibit, or prohibit, use of his methodology for theoretical science by certain sciences. [TRUNCATED] / 2031-01-01

This dissertation examines humor as a situated practice of reappropriation and transformation undertaken by a subject within a social world. I bring together insights from humor studies, philosophy of humor, and feminist philosophy (especially feminist continental philosophy) to introduce the concept of humorwork as an unstable political practice of reappropriating and transforming existing images, speech, and situations. I argue that humorwork is an unstable politics because the practice of reappropriation and transformation often exceeds the intentions of the subject practicing humor, taking on a continued life beyond the humorist’s intentions. By focusing on the practice of humor, the subject who produces it, their social and political world, the affects circulated through political humor, and the politics of popular and scholarly discourse about humor, I push against a reductive, depoliticized concept of humor and the trivializing gesture of “it’s just a joke.” Instead, I argue that humorists are responsible and connected to (if not always blameable) for the social and political life of their humorwork, despite the unstable and unpredictable uptake of humor against a humorist’s intentions.

In this dissertation, I analyze climate change as a collective action problem. Decades of consistent policy and indeed institutional failure suggest that climate change cannot be managed top-down by experts and politicians alone. Climate communicators must therefore take up the challenge of ethically and politically motivating public action on this issue. Unfortunately, the ethical and political logic of climate response presents profound challenges to public motivation that appears to confound thinkers in the climate literature across disciplines. I thus endeavors to rethink the climate situation today from the perspective of collective motivation. Doing justice to the complexities of this multifaceted problematic demands interdisciplinary analysis, but the equally pressing need for general comprehension requires philosophical synthesis. For the climate issue is at once global and intergenerational in scale, and is systemic to modern social and cultural institutions that have long-evolved to structure the way people relate to each other, to nature, and ultimately to the world of everyday experience. My thesis, then, is that this collective action problem is ultimately an existential problem that calls for an existential response. Specifically, I argue that the ethical and political implications of climate response are largely received as an “existential threat” to the extent that they unsettle the integrity of everyday existence lived in common. That is, the deeper implications of this issue roundly contradict the background structures of “lifeworld identity” informing collective experience at some of the most general (socio-cultural) levels of being in the world. The consequences of this existential problem present us with two “quandaries” that must be addressed coherently. The “quandary of denial” signifies the largely ethical challenges of motivating a collective response to the historical and material realities of the climate ‘problem.’ The “quandary of transition,” by contrast, speaks to the relatively political challenges of relating the climate problem as such to climate ‘solutions’ that are collectively meaningful enough to positively inspire viable ways forward. Finally, I conclude by drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty to advance a critical phenomenology of public motivation responsive to these two moments of the existential problem.

My aim in this dissertation is to analyze Black oppression and White domination. I attempt to show how social systems unjustly diminish Black Americans’ opportunities to form and pursue their conceptions of good lives and unjustly strengthen White Americans’ opportunities for the same. I believe that the accounts of Black oppression and White domination I offer are more adept at identifying the expansive and varied wrongs of Black oppression in America, analyzing the relationship between theorizing oppression and addressing oppression through social and political change in America, and demonstrating the ways that Whites benefit from and are incentivized to maintain oppressive systems in America, than the accounts put forward by other theorists. In Chapter 1, I begin by discussing why I frame my project in terms of oppressive “wrongs” rather than “harms”. I worry the term ‘harm’ may be taken to imply that one has experienced subjective suffering or a measurable loss, whereas I am concerned with instantiations of oppressive systems even when they don’t cause the person subject to the oppressive system to experience a measurable loss or subjective suffering. In an effort to describe how I identify wrongs, I then argue that in virtue of the deep importance of freely pursuing one’s chosen life plan, any barriers one faces in pursuing his or her life plan must be justifiable. Barriers one experiences in virtue of his or her race are typically not justifiable. On this basis, I argue for my principle of racial injustice, which states that individuals are prima facie wronged by socially constructed barriers to their abilities to form and seek their conception of a good life if those barriers exist in virtue of their race. The “prima facie” nature of the wrongness is significant, I argue, because correcting the injustices of Black oppression will require that Whites face some barriers to pursuing our life plans that we do not currently face; it is not the case, then, that every race-based barrier is truly wrongful. I then discuss my understanding of race, arguing that race’s mutability across contexts and how one’s race is intimately tied to systems of subordination and domination support my view that race is socially constructed. I end with a brief history of White domination and Black subordination in the U.S. In Chapter 2, I outline general experiences of racism as espoused by Black writers and the statistical data that support these accounts. I then take a deep look at mass incarceration, including a history of the system, its disproportional impact on Black Americans, and the many resulting injustices inflicted largely on incarcerated Black Americans, their families, and their communities. I specifically highlight the recognition-wrongs inflicted on Black Americans through mass incarceration, where recognition-wrongs are acts that function primarily as a mode of dehumanizing individuals. Recognition-wrongs include verbal degradation through things like slurs, but also epistemic injustices, a concept developed by Miranda Fricker and others to identify injustices that wrong individuals in virtue of their status as knowers and communicators of knowledge. I then discuss kinship-wrongs, a concept I develop to identify wrongs that impact people’s ability to form and maintain relationships. I highlight and conceptualize these wrongs in an attempt to draw attention to their significance in racial subordination. In Chapter 3, I develop an account of oppression that is particularly responsive to race-based wrongs. I begin by showing why the influential accounts authored by Iris Marion Young and Ann Cudd are unsatisfactory for capturing Black oppression. I attempt to develop an account that is sensitive to the experiences of subordination detailed by Black Americans, equipped to address the material harms of oppression, and also able to make sense of the recognition- and kinship-wrongs raised in Chapter 2. I ultimately determine that a member of a c-group is subject to an oppressive wrong when, in virtue of his or her or their membership in that c-group, he or she or they suffer wrongs that are systematically perpetrated through social, political, or legal norms, conventions, or practices. A c-group is any collection of persons who share (or would share in similar circumstances) some set of constraints, incentives, penalties, and the like. I end the chapter by carefully describing my commitments to each clause of the definition of oppression, beginning by analyzing c-groups, describing systematically perpetrated wrongs, explaining what it means to be wronged in virtue of one’s c-group membership, and showing that my account of oppression is sensitive to both material and recognition-wrongs. In Chapter 4, I argue that we ought to understand oppression in the framework of a capabilities approach. I begin by explaining the concept of capabilities, which are real opportunities to function in particular ways. I then argue that securing capabilities is a better aim for justice than ensuring that people function in certain valuable ways because a focus on capabilities protects people’s opportunities to pursue the kinds of lives they want to live, respecting their interest in freely determining their life goals, while a focus on protecting valuable functionings inappropriately prescribes life goals to them. I show how capabilities can be utilized as part of a theory of justice, and argue that my utilization of capabilities, combined with the other moral commitments I defend throughout the dissertation, comprises a rectificatory theory of racial justice aimed at eliminating Black oppression (i.e. a theory that analyzes the current racial injustices of oppression and offers guidance on how we should approach redressing these injustices). I argue that through the framework of capabilities, I can analyze both the material and recognition-wrongs of oppression, avoid the kinds of bad idealizations that often skew our understanding of oppressive systems and their impact, and make judgments about modern day society without developing an account of perfect justice. I next show that to avoid inflicting further recognition-wrongs, it is essential that oppressed peoples are the primary arbiters of which capabilities and oppressive systems should be prioritized in policy and advocacy. I conclude Chapter 4 with a brief sketch of how we can turn the priorities of the oppressed into public policy, moving from the prioritization process, to policy development, to implementing policies, and finally to monitoring and revising them. My final chapter, Chapter 5, shows how my account can also be used to analyze the norms of White domination that coincide with Black oppression. I begin by discussing “correlative capabilities,” which are those capabilities that are strengthened for Whites in virtue of the fact that Whites are not subject to oppression as Black Americans are. My discussion of correlative capabilities maps closely onto the advantages typically described as White privilege. I then turn to more insidious advantages Whites gain from Black oppression. I argue that oppressive norms advantage Whites by creating a social structure that empowers us with the capabilities to dominate racial narratives and ignore our racialized identities. The capability to dominate racial narratives consists in Whites’ abilities to pontificate on racialized events without justification for our views and still have our perspectives treated as mainstream, worthy of debate, and often as nearly definitive. I demonstrate this capability in action by examining Colin Kaepernick’s protest in the NFL, the coverage it received, and his resulting treatment. I then discuss Whites’ capability to ignore our racialized identities, showing how we establish Whiteness as a central, unconditioned perspective. Whites see ourselves as “simply people,” while seeing non-Whites as raced. This leads to Whites promoting color-blind conceptions of justice, which move us farther from true justice by ignoring social norms’ impact on policy development and implementation. I then show how Whites may go one step further and argue that we are victimized by “reverse racism” when efforts are made to eliminate oppressive systems. Finally, I end Chapter 5 with a discussion of how Whites are also disadvantaged by Black oppression, particularly in our capabilities to perform our jobs well, live morally, and establish and maintain relationships. I then conclude the dissertation by discussing how we might teach race-sensitive virtues in an effort to change White-favorable social norms.

Appeals to practices are common the humanities and social sciences. They hold the potential to explain interesting or compelling similarities, insofar as similarities are distributed within a community or group. Why is it that people who fall under the same category, whether men, women, Americans, baseball players, Buddhists, feminists, white people, or others, have interesting similarities, such as similar beliefs, actions, thoughts, foibles, and failings? One attractive answer is that they engage in the same practices. They do the same things, perhaps as a result of doing things at the same site or setting, or perhaps as a result of being raised in a similar way among members of the same group. In the humanities, appeals to practices often serve as a move to point out diversity among different communities or diversity within the same community. Communities are distinct from one another in part because their members do different things or do things in different ways. The distinct and varied ways in which different communities enact social norms or formulate law, state institutions, and public policy might be explicable in part by the different practices their members are socialized into. Appeals to practices hold the promise of explaining these differences in terms of the different background practices of the groups, cultivated through a kind of cultural isolation or sense of collective identity. In the social sciences, appeals to practices have played a central role in fundamental theorizing and theory building. Appeals to practices in the social sciences are often much more systematic and theoretical, forming the core of the systematic theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens in Anthropology and Sociology. Practice theory has thus become a growth industry in social scientific investigation, offering the promise of a central object of investigation that explains both unity and difference within and across communities and groups. But it is unclear just what practices are and what role, both ontological and explanatory, that practices are supposed to play. The term `practices' is used to pick out a wide range of things, and its relation to other terms, from `tradition' or `paradigm' to `framework' or `presupposition', is unclear. Practices are posited as ubiquitous, yet they are difficult to isolate and pin down. We are all said to participate in them, but they remain hidden. Their role, whether causal, logical, or hermeneutical, remains mysterious. After locating the historical origins of appeals to practices in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, my dissertation uses Stephen Turner's broad and systematic critique of appeals to practices to develop a new type of account. My account is a phenomenological account that treats practices as human doings that show up to people in material and social environments and make themselves available for specific responses in those environments. I argue that a phenomenological account is an effective alternative to accounts that treat practices as either shared objects with properties or shared and implicit presuppositions. I use a phenomenological account of practices to treat important debates in feminist philosophy and the philosophy of the social sciences, particularly debates over pornography's subordination of women and the classification of mental disorders in psychiatry.