The importance of incorporating value pluralism into a theory of justice is recognized in many conceptualizations of justice. This pluralism is often seen as a reason to attend to a range of perspectives, perspectives which can function as a source of information in determining which principles should guide justice. However, philosophy’s ability to properly attend to different perspectives has received extensive attention in the criticisms of various non-ideal theorists, who argue that ideal-theoretical philosophy runs the risk of excluding important aspects of actual social problems. Taking these criticisms on board, this paper builds on non-ideal theory by arguing for a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to justice. I will explain how this linguistic practice-embedded understanding of justice can be a helpful tool for non-ideal theory, as it can give us insight into why, in various similar but different cases, the notion of justice is seen as applicable. In light of this approach, I will suggest a reorientation of the pluralist demand towards an empirical starting point.
María Lugones theorizes the notion of resistance in terms of the notion of “trespassing,” through which “active subjectivity” has the possibility of problematizing normative practices and redrawing maps of power. In this presentation, I highlight the importance of the aesthesic or the perceptual in Lugones’s view of resistance as developed before her turn to decolonial feminism. In doing so, I point to the manner in which this account of resistance is dependent on a sense of ambiguity inspired by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Moreover, I introduce a notion of aesthetic trespassing in connection to the perception of artworks that discloses the intimacy between the perceiver and the perceived.
This paper explores the limits of philosophy of law in addressing the prevailing political crises of our time–the dissolution of the so-called “rules based liberal order” and the fascist underpinnings of “Western” politics–by considering an alternative approach to legal analysis grounded in a Foucauldian conception of nomos. To show how modern law serves to reproduce global inequalities and hierarchies by institutionalizing and naturalizing colonial relations of force, it reconsiders modern law through the framework of power. In doing so, it posits a new reading of modern law as a technology for upholding what Aníbal Quijano has called “the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power,” or what we can more simply understand as the colonial order of things.
Bio: Sabeen Ahmed is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, where she works in the areas of social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and anticolonial thought. Her teaching and scholarship take as their starting point the recognition that white supremacy is the defining political and existential problem of modernity, and that the discipline of philosophy has historically been implicated in this imperial reality. Her research and pedagogy are grounded in decolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperial commitments that bring global perspectives and historically marginalized voices to bear the major political (and thus philosophical) questions of our present.