A live issue in anthropology and development studies, humanism is not typically addressed by analytic philosophers. Arguing for humanism as a view about truths, Humanism and Embodiment insists that disembodied reason, not religion, should be the target of secularists promoting freedom of enquiry and human community.Susan Babbitt's original study presents humanism as a meta-ethical view, paralleling naturalistic realism in recent analytic epistemology and philosophy of scie...

This book considers the nature and exercise of moral imagination in situations in which our ability to act and choose meaningfully is limited by unarticulated expectations. Moral imagination is a cognitive attitude, in which we regard propositions as true. But it also involves orientation. In moral imagination, we regard propositions as true in order to make something else true, and we act and interpret as if it were true. The demand for explanatory unity in such situations - what I call '...

The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy functions as a textual site where white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Within this text, white women philosophers critique the field of philosophy for its complicity with whiteness as a structure of power, as normative, and as hegemonic. In this way, the authority...

James Ellroy has mined the darkest corners of the American experience, public and private, to paint a landscape of corrupt hearts, minds, and institutions. Ellroy is particularly notable for exploring the connection between the murder of his own mother, when he was ten years old, and his troubled adolescence and early adulthood struggles with addiction. “Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively,” he wrote in the memoir My Dark Places. Dark Places: Crime and Pol...

The Buddha was what today is called an empirical philosopher, taking his philosophy from careful study of the empirical world, and rejecting “high flown” philosophies. As philosophy of existence, his view overlaps with Marx in his most interesting form, which is not the way Marx is typically understood. Marx was reduced to economics while the Buddha was reduced to religion. Many shared his view, including Dostoevsky, Proust, and Victor Hugo. Death is present in such views. But they are not...

Both contemporary philosophy and commonsense morality presuppose a personal autonomy and integrity that an unjust social system may make impossible for some people. Babbitt examines the implications of this insight, drawing on feminist and antiracist political theory, contemporary analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and nonphilosophical literature. She argues for the role of moral imagination in discovering and defending a more humane social vision. }Conventional wisdom and commonsense...

Living in the age of American "hyperpower" the relevance of both international law and conflict resolution have been called into question. Hannum and Babbitt, highly respected practitioners in these respective fields, have collected a series of experts to examine the relationship between these two disciplines. Focusing on self-determination, a particularly thorny issue of international law, Negotiating Self-Determination takes an in-depth look at what an understanding of conflict ...