Speakers
Sharon Krause
(Harvard University)
"Humean Judgment and Democratic Deliberation"
Friday, February 19
Noon-1:30 p.m., 6080 Institute for Social Research
A copy of Professor Krause's paper is available here as a PDF file.
Sharon Krause is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of Liberalism with Honor (Harvard University Press, 2002) as well as articles on modern political thought.
ABSTRACT
Recent work in political theory and philosophy has begun to theorize the affective dimensions of human agency and judgment in new ways. Emphasizing passions, emotions, and desires, these varied efforts are marked by a common concern with the rationalism of the predominant models of liberal-democratic justice. The moral psychology of David Hume (1711-1776) offers a rich and relatively untapped resource for these revisionist efforts to characterize the full complexity of practical judgment as it relates to justice. Hume treated moral judgment as a reflective passion, a form of sentiment in which thought and feeling are integrated at the deepest level yet structured in highly specified ways. Although he rejected the rationalist's faith in the power of reason to motivate action, he took pains to establish the objectivity and impartiality of judgment. Yet Hume shows us why it is important to achieve impartiality in judgment without sacrificing affect, and how it is possible to do so.
Certain features of Hume's approach raise questions about its viability as a resource for contemporary theories of justice, however. Can Humean judgment adequately correct for individual and social bias? Can it support the future-oriented deliberation that liberal-democratic politics requires? Drawing mainly on his Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, this paper shows how Hume's concept of judgment achieves impartiality and avoids narrow subjectivism without sacrificing affective engagement. It then explores briefly the relationship between judgment so conceived and political deliberation, arguing that the institutions and practices of liberal-democratic politics may mitigate some of the difficulties endemic to Humean judgment and help to redeem its potential as a resource for contemporary theories of justice.
Hawley Fogg-Davis
(University of Wisconsin)
"The Allure of a Black Conservative Disposition"
Friday, March 5
Noon-1:30
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
5670 Haven Hall
Hawley Fogg-Davis is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her teaching and research interests are in political theory and public law, in particular, philosophical race theory and ethics and public policy. Her most recent research has been on U.S. domestic transracial adoption policy. She is the author of articles on transracial adoption, feminist political theory, and critical race theory.
ABSTRACT
Black conservatism is often presumed to be inconsistent with Democratic Party affiliation, and thus of little interest in the assessment of contemporary black political thought. And as a political theory, black conservatism remains largely unexamined as something distinct from mainstream or white conservatism. This essay tries to unearth and evaluate some of the philosophical premises of contemporary black conservative arguments by disentangling political theory from political ideology.
Jennifer Pitts
(Yale University)
"The stronger ties of humanity: Humanitarian intervention in the
eighteenth century"
Friday, February 6
In the eighteenth century, philosophical discourse in the natural law
tradition turned away from the interventionist and often aggressively
imperialist views of Grotius and his followers. The period saw a waning
of arguments for 'humanitarian' war, despite many cosmopolitan strains
of political argument, and despite the belligerence of European states
in an age when the balance of power was thought to license preemptive
military action. Nonetheless, thinkers such as Wolff and Vattel
considered the case for intervention, and several political debates
arose regarding the use of force for what were seen as benevolent
motives. When the French wrested control over Corsica from their
Genoese dependents in 1769, a debate erupted in the British press and
political circles about the wisdom and justice of intervening on behalf
of the 'brave Corsicans'. The case for military intervention made by
James Boswell, Edmund Burke, and others drew together a striking
combination of moral arguments, including claims about the rights of
humanity, assertions that Corsicans were a nation deserving
sovereignty, and appeals to British commercial interests and to British
honor in the face of French tyranny. Such attempts at justification of
intervention have been little studied, though they anticipate the
interventionist fervor that would develop in the nineteenth century.
Linda Zerilli
(Northwestern University)
"Feminism and the Practice of Political Judgment"
Friday, April 11
12 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
5670 Haven Hall
Linda Zerilli is Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at
Northwestern University. Her main interests are political theory and
feminist theory while she also draws extensively on continental philosophy,
linguistics, and post-structuralism. Manuscript length works include
Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Cornell,
1994) and the forthcoming Feminism Without Solace (University of Chicago
Press). A selection of shorter works includes: "Doing without Knowing:
Feminism's Politics of the Ordinary" (Political Theory, 1998), "The
Arendtian Body" (in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Pennsylvania
State Univ. Press, 1995 ), "A Process without a Subject: Simone de Beauvoir
and Julia Kristeva on Maternity" (Signs, 1992), and "Machiavelli's Sisters:
Women and "the Conversation" of Political Theory" (Political Theory, 1991).
William Scheuerman
(University of Minnesota)
"Liberal Democracy's Time"
A copy of Professor Scheuerman's paper is available here as a PDF file.
Friday, March 14
1 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
William E. Scheuerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D from Harvard in 1993. His research interests include modern political thought, legal theory, democratic theory, 20th continental political and social thought, and globalization. His publications include Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law; Carl Schmitt: The End of Law; The Rule of Law Under Siege (editor); From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Political and Legal Thought in the Weimar Republic (co- editor). Professor Scheuerman has received the following awards: APSA Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize; Conference for the Study of Political Thought Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize. (Info courtesy of the University of Minnesota Department of Political Science.)
Steven Gerencser
(Indiana University South Bend)
"Artificial Persons and Democratic Politics"
November 8, 2002, 1 p.m.
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
Steven Gerencser, a political theorist at Indiana University South Bend, was trained at the University of Minnesota and is the author, among other things, of The Skeptic's Oakeshott (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Brian Walker
(UCLA)
"Cultivating Democracy: Creative
Citizenship and Idealist Counterculture"
September 20, 2002, 1 p.m.
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
Brian Walker specializes in questions concerning modernization and political praxis, especially the issue of how we might put our normative ideals such as "toleration," "liberty," and "happiness," into practice in a world of corporations, marketing and the industrialization of culture. He is also interested in questions of the relation between culture, nation and territory. He has a broad training both in Continental and Anglo-American political philosophy. In recent years he has been working very intensively on Chinese political thinking, especially that of the Song dynasty. Past graduate seminars have been devoted to the works of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, to the philosophy of the social sciences, and to the trans-cultural discourse on political cultivation. At the undergraduate level his focus has been on the history of US political thinking, particularly in the antebellum period. Recent articles include "Thoreau's Alternative Economics," in the American Political Science Review, "Plural Cultures, Contested Territories," in the Canadian Journal of Political Science and "Thoreau on Democratic Cultivation," in Political Theory.
(Information courtesy of UCLA Political Science Department.)
Mary Shanley
(Vassar College)
"Anonymous Donation and an Open Market in Human Sperm and Eggs:
Should We Limit Individual Autonomy in Reproductive Choice?"
March 8, 2002, noon
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
Professor Shanley holds the Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair at Vassar College. She is author of Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England and Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in a New Age of Reproductive Technology, Adoption, Surrogacy, and Same-Sex and Single Parents' Rights. She is editor, with Carole Pateman, of Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory and with Uma Narayan, of Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Essays.
Professor Shanley served as chair of the APSA Committee on the Status of Women and as President of the Women's Caucus for Political Science. She has been active in groups developing services for battered women in her community. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Political Theory, Signs, Victorian Studies, Hypatia, and the Columbia Law Review.
(Information courtesy of Vassar College.)
Roxanne Euben
(Wellesley College)
"Killing (for) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom and Political Action"
March 15, 2002, 2 p.m.
Institute for Social Research, room 6080
Professor Euben focuses in her research on the relationship between Western and non-Western political theory, particularly on Islamic thought. She is author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism.
Professor Euben's lecture is co-sponsored by the International Instititute and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.
Daniel Little
(University of Michigan - Dearborn)
"Social Kinds and Comparative Research"
February 7, 2002, 4 p.m.
Eldersveld Room, Department of Political Science
Professor Little is Chancellor of the University of Michigan - Dearborn campus. He is a philosopher of social science and also does work in development ethics. He is the author, among other things, of The Scientific Marx, Varieties of Social Explanation, and Microfoundations, Method, and Causation: Essays in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
Professor Little's lecture is co-organized by the Michigan Colloquium in Political Theory and the Comparative Politics subfield in the political science department.
