Bøker av Cynthia Willett

Cynthia Willett brings together diverse insights from social psychology, classical and contemporary literature, and legal and justice theory to redefine the basis of the moral and legal person. Feminists, communitarians, and postmodern thinkers have...

This analysis uncovers the ways in which maternal subjectivities serve as a critique of instrumental reason, how mothers, blacks and other 'slaves' of history are transforming the repressive culture which, in the West, assumes the name of Reason.

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy.Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Comedy, from social ridicule to the laughter of the carnival, provides effective tools for reinforcing social patterns of domination and weapons for emancipation. This book states that comic trumps liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies and intimate relationships, topics which are usually neglected by political philosophy.