Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities 

by Sandra Harding 
Duke University Press, 2008

Modernity studies provide illuminating insights into how scientific and technological pursuits, and their philosophies, might be more productively linked to social justice projects.  This account focuses on how prevalent stereotypes in modernization theory and Enlightenment thought present modernization as a masculine goal and "tradition" as the feminine past which must be abandoned to maintain manliness.  Scientific rationality and technical expertise are the one-way time machines that can transform individual men in traditional societies into modern men, and social institutions lodged in traditional households into modernity's "public sphere," from which all vestiges of tradition and femininity are to be suppressed (supposedly).   Through analyses of three science studies accounts which focus on modernity (Latour, Beck, and Notowny et al), and of feminist, postcolonial, and the multiple modernities arguments, Harding proposes a provocative rethinking of the standpoint project of starting off research from women's lives.

America in Absentia

by Nicholas Ruiz III
Intertheory Press, 2008

The unifying principle of the world is Capital. Ethical conceptions are helpful here. Where a 'fact' is verifiable, a 'value' is relative. In a special case, Capital is an ethical fact by virtue of its valuation, always in flux and exchange. Like moral value, Capital is in the eye of the beholder. Still, this does not mean that there is a grand unifying theory of the real, because the world seeks fragmentation at all times. Life trumps the world by its persistence in the face of inevitable death. Extermination, in the total sense, is the highest stake on the table between the world and life. America is the highest bidder in this speculative game. Let us hope she is bluffing.

Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling: Angst and the Finitude of Being

by Sharin N. Elkholy
The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008

Sharin Elkholy questions the role of Angst in Heidegger's discussion of death and shows that rather than gain the self, a strict phenomenological account of being-toward-death shows the loss of self. At the point of transition from the nothing back to the world of projects and being-with-others Elkholy locates finitude and shows that Heidegger's later thinking of the finitude of Being is rooted in Being and Time. Elkholy further argues that the inter-subjective dimension of Da-sein (Mitda-sein) is prior to the self and through her concept of "ontological occlusion, examines the ontological basis for inclusion and exclusion.

In this volume, feminist philosophers offer cutting-edge perspectives on ethical issues of global and transnational significance.  The topics covered -- from peacekeeping and terrorism, to sex trafficking and women's paid domestic labor, to poverty and religious fundamentalism -- are vital to women and to feminist movements throughout the world.  Contributors include Lynne Arnault, Bat-Ami Bar On, Alyssa Bernstein, Victoria Davion, Peggy DesAutels, Marilyn Fischer, Virginia Held, Peter Higgins, Sabrina Hom, Audra King, James L. Nelson, Serena Parekh, April Shaw, Joan Tronto, and Rebecca Whisnant.

Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life: Feminist Wittgensteinian Metaethics

by Peg O’Connor
Penn State Press, 2008

Peg O’Connor draws inspiration from the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy to develop a new approach to the grounding of ethics (i.e., metaethics) that looks to the interconnected nature of social practices, most especially those that Wittgenstein called “language games.” She deploys new metaphors from architecture and knitting to describe this approach as “felted stabilism,” that locates morality in a large set of overlapping and crisscrossing language games such as seeking justifications for our beliefs and actions, formulating reasons for actions, making judgments, disagreeing with other people or dissenting from dominant norms, and taking and assigning responsibility.

Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom

by Cynthia Willett
Indiana University Press, 2008

This book examines what laughter might mean for the oppressed through studies in African American pragmatism, Hollywood re-marriage comedy and Cavell, Spike Lee and existentialism, and queer camp.  The comic trumps standard liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies, affects, and intimate relationships.  This book provides a wide-ranging discussion of citizenship, social manners, marriage, and political freedom.

Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism

by Carol Wayne White
Suny Press, 2008

Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism introduces contemporary readers to the religious naturalism of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Anne Conway. White shows how Conway's mystical cosmology provides an alternative to the dominant mechanistic models advanced by her leading male contemporaries. She connects Conway’s philosophic impulses to her later conversion to Quakerism, arguing that Quaker practical mysticism and its emphasis on equality within the natural order resonate with Conway’s philosophic naturalism. White also explores convergences between Conway’s emphasis on nature’s sentience and select twentieth-century process and feminist themes in religious naturalism.

How Terrorism is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence

by Virginia Held
Oxford University Press, 2008

This book considers how terrorism differs from other kinds of political violence and in what ways it is wrong. It examines the grounds on which we can judge some violence to be justifiable and other violence always wrong. It considers conventional war, military intervention to protect human rights, liberation movements, and the status and requirements of international law. It looks at the guidance offered by such traditional moral theories as Kantian ethics and utilitarianism and also at what the newer approach of the ethics of care can contribute to our evaluations of violence.

Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non- Ideal

by Lisa Tessman
Springer Publishing, 2009

Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal will collect feminist essays that self-consciously develop non-idealizing approaches to either ethics or social and political philosophy (or both). Characterizing feminist ethics and social and political philosophy as marked by a tendency to be non-idealizing serves to thematize the volume while still allowing the essays to be diverse enough to adequately constitute a representation of current work in the fields of feminist ethics and social and political philosophy.

The Patient as Victim and Vector: Ethics and Infectious Disease

by Margaret P. Battin, Leslie P. Francis, Jay A. Jacobson, Charles B. Smith
Oxford University Press, 2009

The Patient as Victim and Vector is jointly written by four authors at the University of Utah with expertise in bioethics, health law, and both clinical practice and public health policy concerning infectious disease. Part I shows how the patient-centered ethic that was developed by bioethics- especially the concept of autonomy- needs to change in the context of public health, and Part II develops a normative theory for doing so. Part III examines traditional and new issues involving infectious disease: the ethics of quarantine and isolation, research, disease screening, rapid testing, antibiotic use, and immunization, in contexts like multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, syphilis, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, and HPV. Part IV, beginning with a controversial thought experiment, considers constraint in the control of infectious disease, include pandemics, and Part V 'thinks big' about the global scope of infectious disease and efforts to prevent, treat, or eradicate it.

Philosophy and Sex, Fourth Edition

by Robert B. Baker and Kathleen J. Wininger
Prometheus Books, 2008

This classic sourcebook, which has for three decades helped thousands rethink their views of ethics and human sexuality, is all new and totally revised for the challenges of the 21st century. Featuring essays on adultery, monogamy, perversion, homosexuality, pederasty, sex without love, sexual equality and more, Philosophy and Sex retains its uniqueness and accessibility without compromising quality and versatility. New to this fourth edition are essays on the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and in South Africa (including a piece on homosexuality and Apartheid by Desmond Tutu), the historical stigmatization of unmarried women (“On Spinsters”), intersexuality, female sexuality and the Vagina Monologues, male and female circumcision, and much more.

Social and Political Philosophy Classic and Contemporary Readings

edited by Andrea Veltman
Oxford University Press, 2008

This textbook anthology combines ancient and modern classics in social and political philosophy with contemporary work on gender, race, class and multicultural issues in political philosophy.  Focusing on the foundations of society and the state, the classical readings challenge students to examine social ideals like justice, liberty and equality and to ponder philosophical issues concerning the justification of the state, the right scope of individual liberty and the nature of civic obligation.  The contemporary selections represent a plurality of theoretical perspectives, including liberalism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, communitarian ism and feminism.  The contemporary theorists not only carry forward several classical social and political themes but also introduce a range of new issues, including justice within families, terrorism and political violence, and the accommodation of cultural and religious differences within democratic societies. 

The Ethics of Embryo Adoption and the Catholic Tradition

edited by Sarah-Vaughan Brakman and Darlene Fozard Weaver
Springer Publishing, 2008
 
Hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos created for IVF are no longer desired for that purpose. More of their genetic parents are donating them to others to gestate and raise. This practice is politically volatile (figuring in embryonic stem cell debates) and medically and morally complex. Absent official Catholic teaching on embryo adoption, ethicists argue whether the practice is permissible on pro-life grounds or impermissible as a form of assisted reproduction. Here, leading philosophers and theologians advance the current debate and chart new directions in Catholic moral thinking about this intriguing practice. A physician practitioner and embryo-adoptive parents also contribute.

Political Solidarity

by Sally J. Scholz
Penn State University Press, 2008

Scholz lays the groundwork for a theory of political solidarity, asking what solidarity means and how it differs from other social and political concepts like camaraderie, association, or community. Scholz distinguishes a variety of types and levels of solidarity by their moral relations and corresponding obligations. Political solidarity aims to bring about social change by uniting individuals in their response to particular situations of injustice or oppression. The book explores the moral relation of political solidarity, the nature of the solidary group, the role of the privileged, the goals of solidarity movements, and the prospects for global solidarity.