Papers by Joel Chow
Avner de Shalit argues that political philosophy centrally involves political persuasion, defined... more Avner de Shalit argues that political philosophy centrally involves political persuasion, defined as a process of mutual empathy that involves more than just providing rationales or normative arguments. Building upon this idea of political persuasion as mutual empathy, de Shalit thinks that to engage the public, philosophers need to examine problems from the public’s perspective, and not a perspective unique to their professional group. In this paper, I argue that de Shalit’s conception of political persuasion is overly narrow. In its place, I argue for a more pluralistic approach to understanding political persuasion.
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Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2018
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Contemporary Pragmatism 10.2, Feb 10, 2014
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Workshop on Edward Soja's Spatial Justice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
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folio, Aug 4, 2008
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Drafts and Future Projects/ Book Proposals by Joel Chow
Seeking collaborators
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Public philosophy, in its most general conception, is concerned with how theoretical, generally a... more Public philosophy, in its most general conception, is concerned with how theoretical, generally abstract philosophical concerns are ultimately rooted in public interest and particularly in examining how the academic discipline both influences and is influenced by wider societal changes and frames. Thus, understanding how academic philosophy informs wider societal discourse and vice-versa is essential to gaining a critical perspective on the current state of public philosophy, especially in relation to key questions in democratic theory and practice such as tolerance and pluralism.
In this essay, we will examine how academic philosophy has informed current mainstream conceptions of secular liberal democracies, particularly through their conceptions of deep pluralism and cosmopolitanism. We argue that these conceptions of deep pluralism while superficially progressive, implicitly promote a superficial pluralism of taxonomy, which elides difference and assumes that inequality is contingent to pluralism. These conceptions of deep pluralism are generally tied to notions of cosmopolitan education which ignores the actual lived experience of race and gender in contemporary democracies. Examining these portrayals of race, gender, and disability in the light of an epistemology of ignorance shows that these conceptions of philosophy and consequently public philosophy serve as a site of ignorance which masks deep-seated inequality in the conceptual frames in which these notions of pluralism and cosmopolitanism have emerged. In its place, we argue for a cosmopolitanism of vulnerability, and a critical stance for public philosophy which does not aim at an idealized state of knowledge, but pays attention and is rooted in the lived experience of race and gender in contemporary societies
originally for a festchrift on James Tully
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Conference Presentations (Refereed) by Joel Chow
In Logic of Worlds, Badiou attempts to elucidate the experience of an ‘absolute singularity’ thro... more In Logic of Worlds, Badiou attempts to elucidate the experience of an ‘absolute singularity’ through an exposition of the ‘either/or’ in Kierkegaard’s philosophy. For Badiou, Kierkegaard’s theory of radical choice presents a way of understanding the process involved in the subject’s encounter with the truth-event by providing an understanding of the “connection … between choice as a cut in time and the eternity of truth as subjective truth” (425). Understanding how the ahistorical can take on a subjective form is key to enabling us to have a fuller understanding of how rational thought can “take on the historicity of the Absolute” (426). Ley to this reading of Kierkegaard is Badiou’s shift from Being and Event to Logic of Worlds, whereas in the former Badiou was concerned mainly with the articulation of truth in an examination of abstract ontology; in the latter Badiou realizes he needs to provide an account that “thought and truth must not simply account for their being, but also for their appearing, which is say for their existence” (427).
However, while Badiou attempts to posit this reading of Kierkegaard as a means of bridging the gap between the universal and the subjective, ahistorical and temporal in an absolutely singular moment, he ultimately collapses into a dualism through an insistence upon the need for a choice and the subject’s fidelity to the truth-event encountered in the ‘either/or’ decision. This leads Badiou to endorse a view that is open to the dangers of fidelity, particularly in his conception of evil as a betrayal of truth. By denying the existence of the Absolute in the form of God, Badiou places the subject at the centre of the decision, leaving the decision for the subject open to the vagaries of the truth-event. As Matcham argues, it might be possible to read Kierkegaard as providing an alternative to this danger through a radical choice made by the subject through faith and a movement away from certainty which nevertheless underpins both positions.
Yet both these positions fail ultimately to meet the problematic Badiou recognizes is critical in understanding the nature of subjectivity: transversing a duality between self and other. In this paper we argue that Kukai (弘法大師 , 774-835), founder of the Shingon (True Word) School of Buddhism too provides an account of how the Absolute can take on a subjective nature, through his articulation of the nondual nature of reality in his conception of kaji and the consequent two modalities of the Buddha-body based on the distinction between the pure mind of the Buddha (shinno) and its mental functions (shinjo). That is, in the encounter with eternity, it is not only the subject that is transformed, but Buddha himself. It is this nondual understanding of the relationship between self and other, practitioner and Buddha that allows Kukai to break with previous Buddhist traditions in introducing the concept of sokushinjôbutsu: the attainment of enlightenment in this very embodied existence. Here, Kukai transverses Badiou's dualism through his conception of the Dharmakaya as originally nonarising. The mutuality between Buddha and self thus dissipates Badiou Kierkegaard’s insistence upon choice and an assumed dualistic relationship between the subject and God. By placing embodiment at the heart of the relationship between the Dharmakaya and the practitioner Kukai provides an alternative conception of the relationship between being and appearance and the one and the many. Kukai thus stresses the immanence of Shingon practice yet also does not deny a transcendental reality--rather, he recognizes that it is inevitable that we speak of a transcendental structure in language, and consequently, that we can only experience the transcendental in this very body.
Against Badiou’s Kierkegaardian ‘Either/Or’, Kukai offers a radically nondualistic understanding of that moment of the encounter, and paves a way for the radical equality seen in the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, particularly in Shinran’s thought. By arguing for an embodied understanding of transcendence, Kukai also reveals the overly abstract nature of Badiou’s thought and points to the danger of dualism in his move towards a “materialist dialectic”.
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presented at the Fourth Asian Conference on Ethics, Religion and Philosophy 2014 (4th ACERP) at t... more presented at the Fourth Asian Conference on Ethics, Religion and Philosophy 2014 (4th ACERP) at the Osaka International Conference Center, Osaka, Japan, March 27-30, 2014.
Emmanuel Levinas and Alain Badiou seemingly hold diametrically opposed views of the ethical relationship: while Levinas argues that the face of the Other provokes the self and challenges her to an ethical response, Badiou sees the trope of the Other as obscuring the universality of ethics. Instead, Badiou argues for an absolute indifference to difference through a subject loyal to the consequences of the revelatory truth-event. We argue that while Levinas’ and Badiou’s ethical positions seem opposed, closer examination of their philosophical anthropologies reveals both thinkers share the assumption of the incommunicability of ethics. While the truth-event in Badiou and the face of the Other in Levinas cannot be directly experienced, both leave a trace by which subjects are called to disrupt the established norms of representation. The tropes of the trace allow both thinkers to resolve the tension between the impossible ethical demand and a limited subject through an incommunicable subjective experience. However, this sets up a rigid self/other dichotomy and excludes the possibility of a radical collective subject.
The Japanese Pure Land philosopher, Shinran, however, posits a radically different notion of
equality through a dissolution of the self/other dichotomy in Levinas or Badiou. Examining the role of shinjin within Shinran’s thought reveals its radical potential and the limitations of Badiou’s and Levinas’ understanding of ethics.
Shinran articulates that Amida’s Primal Vow reveals the primacy of the ethical moment of the saying-hearing of the nembutsu. The simultaneity of the saying and the hearing of the nembutsu de-absolutizes the self by bringing about an awakening of the self as both foolish and enlightened in the moment of shinjin [spontaneous enlightenment] and jinen [true quiescence]. This nonduality transcends the dichotomy between the self and other, by way of Other-Power, the entrusting of oneself to Amida alone. Shinran thus provides a radical ethical subject.
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Work in Progress by Joel Chow
proposal for Philosophy Compass, special section on Philosophy of Race
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Published and Upcoming Work by Joel Chow
forthcoming vol 5 (2016), International Journal of Badiou Studies
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Food can be understood within global circulations of power and race, and rapid circulation of cui... more Food can be understood within global circulations of power and race, and rapid circulation of cuisines in the global economy of food means foods do not merely cross over from one dominated to another dominating culture (Cook 2003:310), but is part of “messy, mixed-up, interconnected nature of histories, geographies and identities” (Hage, 2008) in multicultural polities. One way to look at cultural appropriation is to look at how cuisine dissemination often do not recognize past and present racialized relations, and how certain foods ‘belong’ in one context. Rogers (2008) provides a typology of cultural appropriation: exchange, dominance, exploitation and transculturation. Studies of cultural appropriation can show that some rhetoric reproduce cultural essentialism through the insistence on “authenticity”, “essence” or “purity”. However an acknowledgement of the hybridity of cultural forms eg food (Bhabha 1994) can emphasize how cultural appropriation also involves active innovation of cultural practices of dominated cultures.
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Drafts by Joel Chow
The epigraph of this paper neatly summarizes part of a puzzle of democratic authority that as Eno... more The epigraph of this paper neatly summarizes part of a puzzle of democratic authority that as Enoch implies, is surprisingly under-examined. Most citizens assume that they have a moral obligation to obey at least some democratic laws, but it is unclear to whom exactly do we owe allegiance to in democratic societies. The democratic assembly, our fellow citizens, or the democratic procedure? The goal of this paper is to examine this puzzle and argues for three theses related to this issue. (1) Almost all contemporary accounts of democratic authority rest on the claim that source of democratic authority is not our fellow citizens but the democratic procedure. Call this the source argument. (2) The source argument is in tension with an account of authority that claims to better capture the nature of practical authority than Joseph Raz’s influential Normal Justification Thesis (NJT): Stephen Darwall’s second-personal account of practical authority. (3) We can avoid the problems of the NJT and Darwall’s account of authority while acknowledging the key elements of both accounts of authority through a practice-based account of democratic authority. While authority does entail a relationship with standing, this does not exclude the possibility of individuals recognizing a practice as both constitutive and derivative of this relationship. Each section of this paper develops each thesis.
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The epigraph of this paper neatly summarizes part of a puzzle of democratic authority that as Eno... more The epigraph of this paper neatly summarizes part of a puzzle of democratic authority that as Enoch implies, is surprisingly under-examined. Most citizens assume that they have a moral obligation to obey at least some democratic laws, but it is unclear to whom exactly do we owe allegiance to in democratic societies. The democratic assembly, our fellow citizens, or the democratic procedure? The goal of this paper is to examine this puzzle and argues for three theses related to this issue. (1) Almost all contemporary accounts of democratic authority rest on the claim that source of democratic authority is not our fellow citizens but the democratic procedure. Call this the source argument. (2) The source argument is in tension with an account of authority that claims to better capture the nature of practical authority than Joseph Raz’s influential Normal Justification Thesis (NJT): Stephen Darwall’s second-personal account of practical authority. (3) We can avoid the problems of the NJT and Darwall’s account of authority while acknowledging the key elements of both accounts of authority through a practice-based account of democratic authority. While authority does entail a relationship with standing, this does not exclude the possibility of individuals recognizing a practice as both constitutive and derivative of this relationship. Each section of this paper develops each thesis.
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Papers by Joel Chow
Drafts and Future Projects/ Book Proposals by Joel Chow
In this essay, we will examine how academic philosophy has informed current mainstream conceptions of secular liberal democracies, particularly through their conceptions of deep pluralism and cosmopolitanism. We argue that these conceptions of deep pluralism while superficially progressive, implicitly promote a superficial pluralism of taxonomy, which elides difference and assumes that inequality is contingent to pluralism. These conceptions of deep pluralism are generally tied to notions of cosmopolitan education which ignores the actual lived experience of race and gender in contemporary democracies. Examining these portrayals of race, gender, and disability in the light of an epistemology of ignorance shows that these conceptions of philosophy and consequently public philosophy serve as a site of ignorance which masks deep-seated inequality in the conceptual frames in which these notions of pluralism and cosmopolitanism have emerged. In its place, we argue for a cosmopolitanism of vulnerability, and a critical stance for public philosophy which does not aim at an idealized state of knowledge, but pays attention and is rooted in the lived experience of race and gender in contemporary societies
originally for a festchrift on James Tully
Conference Presentations (Refereed) by Joel Chow
However, while Badiou attempts to posit this reading of Kierkegaard as a means of bridging the gap between the universal and the subjective, ahistorical and temporal in an absolutely singular moment, he ultimately collapses into a dualism through an insistence upon the need for a choice and the subject’s fidelity to the truth-event encountered in the ‘either/or’ decision. This leads Badiou to endorse a view that is open to the dangers of fidelity, particularly in his conception of evil as a betrayal of truth. By denying the existence of the Absolute in the form of God, Badiou places the subject at the centre of the decision, leaving the decision for the subject open to the vagaries of the truth-event. As Matcham argues, it might be possible to read Kierkegaard as providing an alternative to this danger through a radical choice made by the subject through faith and a movement away from certainty which nevertheless underpins both positions.
Yet both these positions fail ultimately to meet the problematic Badiou recognizes is critical in understanding the nature of subjectivity: transversing a duality between self and other. In this paper we argue that Kukai (弘法大師 , 774-835), founder of the Shingon (True Word) School of Buddhism too provides an account of how the Absolute can take on a subjective nature, through his articulation of the nondual nature of reality in his conception of kaji and the consequent two modalities of the Buddha-body based on the distinction between the pure mind of the Buddha (shinno) and its mental functions (shinjo). That is, in the encounter with eternity, it is not only the subject that is transformed, but Buddha himself. It is this nondual understanding of the relationship between self and other, practitioner and Buddha that allows Kukai to break with previous Buddhist traditions in introducing the concept of sokushinjôbutsu: the attainment of enlightenment in this very embodied existence. Here, Kukai transverses Badiou's dualism through his conception of the Dharmakaya as originally nonarising. The mutuality between Buddha and self thus dissipates Badiou Kierkegaard’s insistence upon choice and an assumed dualistic relationship between the subject and God. By placing embodiment at the heart of the relationship between the Dharmakaya and the practitioner Kukai provides an alternative conception of the relationship between being and appearance and the one and the many. Kukai thus stresses the immanence of Shingon practice yet also does not deny a transcendental reality--rather, he recognizes that it is inevitable that we speak of a transcendental structure in language, and consequently, that we can only experience the transcendental in this very body.
Against Badiou’s Kierkegaardian ‘Either/Or’, Kukai offers a radically nondualistic understanding of that moment of the encounter, and paves a way for the radical equality seen in the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, particularly in Shinran’s thought. By arguing for an embodied understanding of transcendence, Kukai also reveals the overly abstract nature of Badiou’s thought and points to the danger of dualism in his move towards a “materialist dialectic”.
Emmanuel Levinas and Alain Badiou seemingly hold diametrically opposed views of the ethical relationship: while Levinas argues that the face of the Other provokes the self and challenges her to an ethical response, Badiou sees the trope of the Other as obscuring the universality of ethics. Instead, Badiou argues for an absolute indifference to difference through a subject loyal to the consequences of the revelatory truth-event. We argue that while Levinas’ and Badiou’s ethical positions seem opposed, closer examination of their philosophical anthropologies reveals both thinkers share the assumption of the incommunicability of ethics. While the truth-event in Badiou and the face of the Other in Levinas cannot be directly experienced, both leave a trace by which subjects are called to disrupt the established norms of representation. The tropes of the trace allow both thinkers to resolve the tension between the impossible ethical demand and a limited subject through an incommunicable subjective experience. However, this sets up a rigid self/other dichotomy and excludes the possibility of a radical collective subject.
The Japanese Pure Land philosopher, Shinran, however, posits a radically different notion of
equality through a dissolution of the self/other dichotomy in Levinas or Badiou. Examining the role of shinjin within Shinran’s thought reveals its radical potential and the limitations of Badiou’s and Levinas’ understanding of ethics.
Shinran articulates that Amida’s Primal Vow reveals the primacy of the ethical moment of the saying-hearing of the nembutsu. The simultaneity of the saying and the hearing of the nembutsu de-absolutizes the self by bringing about an awakening of the self as both foolish and enlightened in the moment of shinjin [spontaneous enlightenment] and jinen [true quiescence]. This nonduality transcends the dichotomy between the self and other, by way of Other-Power, the entrusting of oneself to Amida alone. Shinran thus provides a radical ethical subject.
Work in Progress by Joel Chow
Published and Upcoming Work by Joel Chow
Drafts by Joel Chow
In this essay, we will examine how academic philosophy has informed current mainstream conceptions of secular liberal democracies, particularly through their conceptions of deep pluralism and cosmopolitanism. We argue that these conceptions of deep pluralism while superficially progressive, implicitly promote a superficial pluralism of taxonomy, which elides difference and assumes that inequality is contingent to pluralism. These conceptions of deep pluralism are generally tied to notions of cosmopolitan education which ignores the actual lived experience of race and gender in contemporary democracies. Examining these portrayals of race, gender, and disability in the light of an epistemology of ignorance shows that these conceptions of philosophy and consequently public philosophy serve as a site of ignorance which masks deep-seated inequality in the conceptual frames in which these notions of pluralism and cosmopolitanism have emerged. In its place, we argue for a cosmopolitanism of vulnerability, and a critical stance for public philosophy which does not aim at an idealized state of knowledge, but pays attention and is rooted in the lived experience of race and gender in contemporary societies
originally for a festchrift on James Tully
However, while Badiou attempts to posit this reading of Kierkegaard as a means of bridging the gap between the universal and the subjective, ahistorical and temporal in an absolutely singular moment, he ultimately collapses into a dualism through an insistence upon the need for a choice and the subject’s fidelity to the truth-event encountered in the ‘either/or’ decision. This leads Badiou to endorse a view that is open to the dangers of fidelity, particularly in his conception of evil as a betrayal of truth. By denying the existence of the Absolute in the form of God, Badiou places the subject at the centre of the decision, leaving the decision for the subject open to the vagaries of the truth-event. As Matcham argues, it might be possible to read Kierkegaard as providing an alternative to this danger through a radical choice made by the subject through faith and a movement away from certainty which nevertheless underpins both positions.
Yet both these positions fail ultimately to meet the problematic Badiou recognizes is critical in understanding the nature of subjectivity: transversing a duality between self and other. In this paper we argue that Kukai (弘法大師 , 774-835), founder of the Shingon (True Word) School of Buddhism too provides an account of how the Absolute can take on a subjective nature, through his articulation of the nondual nature of reality in his conception of kaji and the consequent two modalities of the Buddha-body based on the distinction between the pure mind of the Buddha (shinno) and its mental functions (shinjo). That is, in the encounter with eternity, it is not only the subject that is transformed, but Buddha himself. It is this nondual understanding of the relationship between self and other, practitioner and Buddha that allows Kukai to break with previous Buddhist traditions in introducing the concept of sokushinjôbutsu: the attainment of enlightenment in this very embodied existence. Here, Kukai transverses Badiou's dualism through his conception of the Dharmakaya as originally nonarising. The mutuality between Buddha and self thus dissipates Badiou Kierkegaard’s insistence upon choice and an assumed dualistic relationship between the subject and God. By placing embodiment at the heart of the relationship between the Dharmakaya and the practitioner Kukai provides an alternative conception of the relationship between being and appearance and the one and the many. Kukai thus stresses the immanence of Shingon practice yet also does not deny a transcendental reality--rather, he recognizes that it is inevitable that we speak of a transcendental structure in language, and consequently, that we can only experience the transcendental in this very body.
Against Badiou’s Kierkegaardian ‘Either/Or’, Kukai offers a radically nondualistic understanding of that moment of the encounter, and paves a way for the radical equality seen in the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, particularly in Shinran’s thought. By arguing for an embodied understanding of transcendence, Kukai also reveals the overly abstract nature of Badiou’s thought and points to the danger of dualism in his move towards a “materialist dialectic”.
Emmanuel Levinas and Alain Badiou seemingly hold diametrically opposed views of the ethical relationship: while Levinas argues that the face of the Other provokes the self and challenges her to an ethical response, Badiou sees the trope of the Other as obscuring the universality of ethics. Instead, Badiou argues for an absolute indifference to difference through a subject loyal to the consequences of the revelatory truth-event. We argue that while Levinas’ and Badiou’s ethical positions seem opposed, closer examination of their philosophical anthropologies reveals both thinkers share the assumption of the incommunicability of ethics. While the truth-event in Badiou and the face of the Other in Levinas cannot be directly experienced, both leave a trace by which subjects are called to disrupt the established norms of representation. The tropes of the trace allow both thinkers to resolve the tension between the impossible ethical demand and a limited subject through an incommunicable subjective experience. However, this sets up a rigid self/other dichotomy and excludes the possibility of a radical collective subject.
The Japanese Pure Land philosopher, Shinran, however, posits a radically different notion of
equality through a dissolution of the self/other dichotomy in Levinas or Badiou. Examining the role of shinjin within Shinran’s thought reveals its radical potential and the limitations of Badiou’s and Levinas’ understanding of ethics.
Shinran articulates that Amida’s Primal Vow reveals the primacy of the ethical moment of the saying-hearing of the nembutsu. The simultaneity of the saying and the hearing of the nembutsu de-absolutizes the self by bringing about an awakening of the self as both foolish and enlightened in the moment of shinjin [spontaneous enlightenment] and jinen [true quiescence]. This nonduality transcends the dichotomy between the self and other, by way of Other-Power, the entrusting of oneself to Amida alone. Shinran thus provides a radical ethical subject.