mronzoni

DISCLAIMER: I am on holiday so will not be able to moderate comments assiduously. Apologies in advance for that.

On September 25^th, Italians will vote at yet another snap election. This is the first ever Italian national election following a Summer electoral campaign – Italians are quite homogeneous and consistent in taking their holidays in August, a month over which politics usually retreats to the back stage. This Summer, instead, beach parties, open-air clubs and sagre (village fêtes, often taking place during the tourist season) will be the stage of campaigning and canvassing. [click to continue…]

I am opening a thread on the Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision. What will happen next? What should happen next – especially on the legislative side? Where should activists concentrate their efforts? Where are they concentrating their efforts already? What is being organised at grassroot level and which projects look most promising on the short/medium run (i.e. where should one send their money is one has some to send)? Which pieces have you read and think are worth sharing?

I will do my best with moderation but cannot be on it exclusively* all day, so bear with me.

Two byelections took place in England yesterday, Thursday June 23^rd 2021; they were both caused by the two respective Conservative MPs resigning in disgrace – in one case, for a sexual assault conviction; in the other, for watching pornography in the House of Commons. [click to continue…]

I read Ferrante’s latest novel (the title of the English translation is The Lying Life of Adults) over the Easter break and it felt like coming home. I don’t know whether I am prepared to say that it is “objectively” better than her other stand-alone novels (other than the Brilliant Friend saga, I mean), but it spoke to me in a way that they didn’t. [click to continue…]

As a small child, for a series of biographical reasons (I was mainly raised by, and lived with, my grandparents, while my parents lived and worked abroad, until the end of primary school) I was not offered the option of engaging in regular extra-curricular activities, including sports. Then, by the time I was old enough to take the initiative myself, I was convinced that I was not good enough to engage in any organised sports. I wanted to play volleyball, but all the kids in the local girls volleyball club had been playing for years and were much better than me. Most importantly, training was important, of course, but fixtures were the main event…and I was terrified by the idea of playing in a real match. [click to continue…]

A while back I wrote a post on the gender wars, where I argued that there are reasons for both parties to acknowledge that the other might have a standpoint which they themselves (partly) lack, and that – relatedly – gender dogmatism is a double-edged sword. [click to continue…]

So, I had promised a Part 2, and here it is. As I anticipated in Part 1, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that we should look at early Modern and Modern exchanges between, especially, Europeans and native North-Americans in a different way. If we take seriously what European intellectuals, missionaries and explorers of the time report, the story they tell us is one of encounters characterised by muscular, vibrant debates about the merits of different social arrangements and life-styles. Crucially, in these debates, both parties were active, passionate participants, and indigenous intellectuals had very sharp criticisms to make to western political structures, as they were getting to know them. This is not the central thesis of the book (which is about early humans, recall), but it is put forward as a clue to the fact that we might have a tendency to stubbornly deny certain pieces of evidence – even when they lie in front of us, in plain sight. [click to continue…]

I recently finished reading* The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow; I enjoyed it very much indeed. I thought I’d write a two parts review for CT, and here’s the first – I will publish the second in a few days. It is a very long, sprawling (in a good way) book, and there are (at least) two main themes in it, so addressing each separately feels right. This post is mainly about the book’s attempt to dismantle the myth of “agriculture as the source of social inequality.” The next post will be about Graeber’s and Wengrow’s startling claim that European Enlightenment can be seen, to a large extent, as the result of a conversation with indigenous, non-western intellectuals and societies – indeed, as inspired by them. [click to continue…]

Both stories are properly Palaeolithic news by now, but two incidents really struck me, in similar yet complementary ways, about a year ago. I hope CT readers will cut me some COVID-related slack (I know, always the same excuse…) if I go back to them now. One was the controversy around the statue dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, London; the other was a set of reactions to the striking lack of sexism in The Queen’s Gambit –  the Netflix miniseries, based on Walter Tevis’s novel of the same name, about the career arch of fictional orphan chess prodigy Beth Harmon. [click to continue…]

Several publishers have decided to make Waheed’s work temporarily open access to honour his memory.

These two have been brought to my attention, please post in the comments if you know of more: [click to continue…]

This is a tribute for Waheed Hussain, who passed away on January 30th, 2021, by the Members of the Economic Ethics Network, of which some CT-ers are part.

Waheed Hussain was a political philosopher whose work addressed some of the central questions faced by citizens living in contemporary capitalist societies. He thought and wrote about a wide range of topics at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, economics and business ethics, developing insightful work on issues from the ethics of consumption and competition to the nature and justification of the corporation. Across all of the rich and nuanced work that he produced was an underlying concern to address one fundamental question: how best can people live free, autonomous lives, relating on fair terms with their fellow democratic citizens, given the mystifications and constraints generated by a market economy? [click to continue…]

A guest post by Professor Sophie Grace Chappell (Philosophy, Open University)

As an open response to the following blog post by JK Rowling:

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

June 11 2020

Dear Ms Rowling,

I am as far as I know the only Professor of Philosophy in the UK who is also transgender. Because my own research is in ethics, because I have in the past been a Governor of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (though I’m not their spokeswoman here), and because obviously I am also personally involved, I have said a few things in public on transgender issues. So I hope I won’t offend you if I chip in with a few thoughts about the current furore over your recent remarks. [click to continue…]

*I have done some edits on September 24th, thanks to some input by Tim Waligore and Brian Carey, whom I thank.

There is no need to point out to the readers of this blog that the debate between gender critical feminists (henceforth GCFs) and the supporters of strong transgender rights* is both as lively and, unfortunately, as toxic as ever.

I have long been sitting on the fence with respect to this issue, for very obvious reasons of self-preservation – apart from organizing a small workshop on the topic last May, whose primary aim was to bring people together hoping that a genuine debate might ensue, rather than taking a stand.

I still have no plan to leave the fence properly (let alone for the fact that I am no expert, to say the least!), but let’s say that this post is a timid attempt to take a peek at what happens if I climb down from it and take a few steps. The aim is to very tentatively make three points which, to my knowledge, do not feature in the debate as it is currently unfolding -  although the first two are actually fairly long-standing insights within the feminist literature more broadly, beyond the gender identity debate narrowly construed. And by the way: I am very happy to be corrected if this is not the case and these points are actually being made in the current debate! So – bracing myself – here we go. [click to continue…]