In this introduction, I offer a broad overview of Asha Bhandary's Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture so that readers can better situate the suggestions of this symposium's contributors: Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg, and Helga Varden. Bhandary develops and defends the theory of liberal dependency care in response to the failure of past liberal theorizing to appreciate that dependency care — which is essential to our survival — is a matter of justice. By concluding with a Hamptonian framing, I hope to further generate discussion of this novel work that broadens the influence of contemporary feminist liberal theorizing.

John Rawls and Asha Bhandary use David Hume's conditions of justice to frame the original position choice from which principles of justice are selected. To use Hume's conditions in this way excludes from representation those who are not full cooperators, including people who need lifelong dependency care. This implies that their claim to dependent care is not a fundamental claim of justice, but must have significantly lower priority. This article argues that an appropriate theory of liberal dependency care will abandon this Humean framing assumption, and will treat the claim to dependency care as a fundamental requirement of justice.

Caregiving is crucial for any society; however, it often goes unnoticed and unanalyzed within theories of justice. Asha Bhandary's theory of liberal dependency care seeks to both rectify the invisibility of care and defend principles of justice for caregiving arrangements by arguing for several important modifications to John Rawls's theory of justice. In this article, I analyze Bhandary's modifications to Rawls's theory to consider how well liberal dependency care fits into a broader political liberal framework, while still securing protection against oppression. I also evaluate the permissibility and limits of teaching children autonomy and caregiving skills in a politically liberal society.

This review locates Asha Bhandary's Freedom to Care in the history of philosophy, notes some of the theory's distinctive features that clearly advance the care theory tradition, and raises some puzzles and questions regarding specific elements of the theory. My remarks focus mostly on Part I of the book and on the following four topics: (1) Bhandary's Rawlsian roots, (2) Bhandary's engagement with Eva Feder Kittay, (3) Bhandary's choice of J. S. Mill and John Rawls as her main historical interlocutors, and finally, (4) Bhandary's methodological choice of ‘men/fathers,’ ‘women/mothers,’ and ‘children/girls/boys’ as the main focus of much of her analysis.

In this article, I respond to symposium articles by Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg, and Helga Varden. With shared sympathies for anti-oppression liberalism and social contract theory, they urge me to develop the theory of liberal dependency care (LDC) in new directions — respectively, as a form of subject-centered justice, with a political liberal justification, and with a Kantian foundation for ‘private right.’ I respond by explicating the inclusivity that is built into the arrow of care map and the variety of contract theory I advance. Furthermore, I insist that anti-oppression liberalism need not formulate its claims in political liberal terms.

Le concept de race a oscillé dès l'origine entre la sphère politico-sociale et la biologie. Si les perspectives sociales ont été dominantes dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, une nouvelle forme de naturalisation semble émerger à l’ère de l’épigénétique. Dans cet article, je montre que la conception épigénétique de la race rappelle d'anciennes perspectives externalistes et engage à articuler naturalisme, environnementalisme et constructivisme biosocial. Je souligne qu'elle fait apparaître la race comme une propriété relationnelle, plastique et accidentelle, et les groupes raciaux comme des constructions bio-sociales historiquement contingentes.

We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is attributable to factors that have little to do with the aesthetic object. The evidence appealed to is a form of Higher-Order Evidence (HOE) and we consider attempts to overcome said evidence. We argue they are unsuccessful. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making aesthetic judgements.

Cet article est consacré à l'analyse d'un recueil d'articles publié par Gilles Deleuze en 1953 sous la direction de Georges Canguilhem. Ce recueil, très peu lu et commenté, éclaire cependant la trajectoire intellectuelle de son auteur en soulignant les hésitations théoriques qui furent les siennes. Nous montrons en effet que Deleuze a alors esquissé un projet « psycho-sociologique » ambitieux qu'il n'a cependant jamais totalement actualisé mais qui n'a cessé de travailler son œuvre. Pour ce faire, nous reconstitutions l'ensemble du sous-texte psychologique et éthologique étudié par Deleuze, en tentant de suivre ses sources exactes de première ou de seconde main ; nous mettons ainsi en évidence de réelles prises de position théoriques souvent inaperçues dans son œuvre (vis-à-vis de Henri Bergson, Jakob von Uexküll et la gestaltpsychologie notamment). Nous faisons alors l'hypothèse que ce sont les difficultés liées à la théorie de la perception qui conduisent Deleuze à se détourner de ce projet esquissé dans les années 1950 afin de se consacrer à des problématiques d'ordre plus spécifiquement ontologique. Nous montrons cependant que ces difficultés persistent tout au long des ouvrages deleuziens où les notions de « signe » et de « sémiotique » viennent à la fois recouvrir et éviter les problèmes spécifiquement perceptifs.

The literature on the metaphysics of gender is partially marked by a tension between conceptions that understand gender categories as importantly at least partly self-determined identities and those that understand them as social or cultural categories imposed upon others as a tool of oppression. I argue that this tension can be mediated by understanding gender categories as essentially contested. I then draw on “radical functionalism” to argue that, while, divorced of context, competing conceptions can simultaneously explicate an essentially contested concept, within context, some conceptions better meet background purposes underlying the use of the concept than others.

Le concept de valeur est souvent disqualifié pour son ambivalence : la valeur croît et décroît ; elle est reconnue par les uns, mais pas par les autres. Les philosophies de la valeur seraient subjectivistes ou contaminées par une rationalité économique. Nous montrons, à partir de Gilbert Simondon, que la valeur peut être conçue comme une grandeur variable sans tomber dans le nivellement ou le relativisme axiologique. Ceci implique de congédier la séparation néokantienne de l'ontologie et de l'axiologie, de rejeter la conception de la culture comme ensemble de valeurs (et la bipolarité des oppositions de valeur), et enfin de mobiliser une analogie physico-mathématique plutôt qu’économique pour penser la valeur.

According to A. John Simmons's anarchist scepticism, there is no duty to obey the law as things stand, as legal obligations have legitimacy only when voluntarily incurred by most or many citizens. However, an alternative, pluralist position is suggested by Simmons's sensitivity to the diversity of reasons and to the possibility of unresolved conflict. It shows that the grounds of legitimate authority are plural, and include distributive justice. Also, even voluntarily incurred obligations can be defeated by conflicting reasons, as when we are duty bound to an unjust regime.