In this collection of previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory and on the resources of contemporary analytic philosophy to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. Explicating the workings of these interlocking structures provides tools for understanding and combatting social injustice.
In these Spinoza Lectures, collectively titled?Critical Theory and Practice?, Sally Haslanger engages with the topic of critical theory and ideology. In the first lecture, Haslanger addresses the ideologically governed nature of social life. She discusses how ideology works through social practices that engage, produce, and reproduce the material world. The lecture examines ways in which ideology is dependent on the objectivity and the materiality of the social world, and the implications of this for social change. The second lecture starts with the observation that our societies and practices are unjust and the proper objects of moral scrutiny and moral criticism. However, certain traditions of ideology critique resist normative, especially moral, commitments. By examining the workings of race and gender ideology, Haslanger challenges the critical tradition of relying entirely on contradiction to ground immanent critique and explores alternative contextualist and naturalist options for social critique.
In this collection of previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory and on the resources of contemporary analytic philosophy to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. Explicating the workings of these interlocking structures provides tools for understanding and combatting social injustice.
Across public discourse, in the media, politics, many branches of academic inquiry, and ordinary daily interactions, we spend a lot time talking about race: race relations, racial violence, discrimination based on race, racial integration, racial progress. It is fair to say that questions about race have vexed our social life. But for all we speak about race, do we know what race is? Is it a social construct or a biological object? Is it a bankrupt holdover from a time before sophisticated scientific understanding and genetics, or can it still hold up in biological, genetic, and other types of research? Most fundamentally, is race real? In this book, four prominent philosophers and race theorists debate how best to answer these difficult questions, applying philosophical tools and the principles of social justice to cutting-edge findings from the biological and social sciences. Each presents a distinct view of race: Sally Haslanger argues that race is a socio-political reality. Chike Jeffers maintains that race is not only political but also, importantly, cultural. Quayshawn Spencer pursues the idea that race is biologically real. And Joshua Glasgow argues that either race is not real, or if it is, it must be real in a way that is neither social nor biological. Each offers an argument for their own view and then replies to the others. Woven together, the result is a lively debate that opens up numerous ways of understanding race. Above all, it is call for sophisticated and principled discussion of something that significantly permeates our lives.
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