General

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, and often with notions of beauty and sublimity in art and nature. In so doing, it has largely ignored the quotidian and familiar objects and experiences that make up our daily lives. Yet how we interact with design involves aesthetic choices and judgements as well as practical, cognitive and moral considerations. This work challenges the discipline to broaden its scope to include design, and illustrates how aesthetics helps define our human concerns. Subjecting design to as rigorous a treatment as any other aesthetic object exposes it to three main challenges that form the core of this book. First, design must be distinguished from art and craft as a unique kind of object meriting separate philosophical attention, and is here defined in part by its functional qualities. Second, the experience of design must be defended as having a particularly aesthetic nature. Here Forsey adapts the Kantian notion of dependent beauty to provide a model for our appreciation of design as different from our judgments of art, craft and natural beauty. Finally, design is important for aesthetics and philosophy as a whole in that it is implicated in broader human concerns. Forsey situates her theory of design as a constructive contribution to the recent movement of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to re-enfranchise philosophical aesthetics as an important part of philosophy at large.

How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? In Identities and Freedom, Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of identity – both individual identity and the collective identity of “women” – in relation to freedom. Drawing on Taylor and Foucault, Butler, Zerilli, Mahmood, Mohanty, Young, and others, Weir develops a complex and nuanced account of identities that takes seriously the ways in which identity categories are bound up with power relations, with processes of subjection and exclusion, yet argues that identities are also sources of important values, and of freedom, for they are shaped and sustained by relations of interdependence and solidarity. Moving out of the paradox of identity and freedom requires understanding identities as effects of multiple contesting relations of power and relations of interdependence. Weir argues that our identities are best understood as our connections: to each other, to ourselves, and to ideals. And she argues that our freedom is found in these connections. If the question of identity is “to whom and to what am I importantly connected?” the question of freedom is about the nature of those connections: how do the relationships that hold us together constitute not just shackles but sources of freedom? Identities are sources of freedom if they are understood not as static categories but as practices: hence Weir leads us from a notion of identity as a fixed epistemological category to identity as an ongoing, dynamically unfolding practical-political process of identification. And she envisions a politics of transformative identifications: practices that risk the difficult work of connection through conflict, openness and change. Her account of transformative identity politics as a politics of identification thus moves beyond mere strategic essentialism to articulate a more coherent basis for feminist politics.

The book collects fifteen previously uncollected philosophical works, including a new defence of ‘success semantics’ and an introduction arguing that philosophy needs no special ‘meta-philosophy’. The chapters are grouped into three parts. Part I is about how the ways we are disposed to act fixes both what we believe and what we use language to mean. Part II is about what there is: the reality of dispositions; what makes beliefs and sentences true; why there is only one universe; and how social groups, and other things with parts, are related to the people and other things that are their parts. Part III is about time: twentieth century developments in its philosophy; why Kant, while wrong about time, was right about tense; why forward time travel is trivial and backward time travel impossible; and what gives time its direction.