Sarah Tyson

Symposium Introduction
As feminist philosophers continue to radically change European and Anglophone philosophy, the exclusion of women from this tradition is increasingly recognized as a central problem not just for the demographics of the field, but also for how philosophy is practiced. In light of this growing awareness, many philosophers have begun to rethink the canon and how it is transmitted. Yet, even with the acknowledgment of some women as philosophers, little progress has been made in changing the composition of the field or dominant conceptions of who is really important in its history. In Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better, Sarah Tyson diagnoses why many efforts to reclaim historical women as philosophers have had little impact on who is afforded philosophical authority. She argues that as long as the norms built on women’s exclusion remain operative, reclamation will not fundamentally affect European and Anglophone philosophical history or practice.

Tyson argues that transformative reclamation practices can change this situation. Through investigating the role of exclusion in dominant norms of philosophical practice, transformative reclamation offers new norms arising from engagements with historical thinkers, especially those typically afforded little philosophical authority. Tyson outlines transformative reclamation strategies based on the work of three influential theorists of exclusion: Genevieve Lloyd, Luce Irigaray, and Michèle Le Doeuff. Each offers powerful approaches for redressing the erasures and prohibitions that have helped define European and Anglophone philosophy as a field.

Following the possibilities opened up by these thinkers, Tyson reclaims two texts from the early women’s rights movement in the United States: The Declaration of Sentiments approved at the 1848 meeting on women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York, and Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech in Akron, Ohio. Through speculative readings of these texts, Where Are the Women? engages their philosophical authority, displacing the obscuring legends that have grown up around them. Truth’s actions, in particular, have become legend and the speech she gave in Akron, a feminist touchstone. Truth is widely believed to have thundered out: “Ain’t I a woman?” to a crowd hostile to the idea of women’s political rights. She is typically read as offering a corrective about race to the movement started in Seneca Falls. Yet, this version of events not only fails to be substantiated by documentary evidence, it also screens the plurivocal way Truth was intervening into the debate about how to define and advocate for women’s rights. Tyson revisits this history to engage Truth as a philosopher of freedom and to offer a case study in how reclamation can change philosophy.

Symposium Introduction
It would be difficult to overstate the timeliness of Linda Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Though several years have passed since its initial publication, its main themes and arguments continue to resonate as the messiness of democratic politics unfolds before our eyes in real time. The past five years has seen a resurgence of right-wing populism from the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to Donald Trump’s election in the United States. Though these are the most visible examples of right-wing movements for observers of Western politics, such movements are not limited by geography: Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Duterte in the Philippines indicate that the rise of right-wing populist sentiment is a global phenomenon, leaving political theorists and historians scrambling to interpret these turbulent political circumstances. Indeed, the rise of such populist movements has led some to postulate whether the very project of democracy is dying before our eyes.1 Against this background and context, I submit that Zerilli’s thought—and by extension Hannah Arendt’s—is needed now more than ever.
To try and succinctly capture the main thrust of Zerilli’s work would be difficult as its themes and arguments are multifaceted, and she engages with a voluminous amount of contemporary literature in political theory. However, we might capture something of crucial import about her work if we ask the following question: What does it mean to speak together within contemporary political societies and not at or against one another? Specifically, how can we offer judgments to one another about political events in the absence of a shared world?2
Given the above context, the events of contemporary politics certainly should give us pause. These events also give Zerilli’s Arendtian insight at the opening of her text renewed purchase in the years since its publication:
In light of the widespread value pluralism of multicultural democracies, we, democratic citizens, find ourselves increasingly called upon to make judgments about practices not always our own, judgments that require what Arendt called the capacity for “representative thinking”—that is, an ability to and willingness to imagine how the world looks to people whose standpoints one does not necessarily share.3
This imaginative capacity, upon which Zerilli builds her own account of “democratic world-building,” is, in my estimation, something contemporary citizens must be engaged in. I say this because of the urgency current of political circumstances—urgent in the sense of palpably lacking a common world from which to build dialogue and discourse with others. Zerilli suggests we can build such worlds through imaginative engagement with perspectives other than our own.
Within this context of world-building, I’d like to briefly introduce the essays in this symposium. The content of the essays is diverse and each approaches Zerilli’s text from a somewhat different angle, but all aim either to extend or critically engage her central arguments. The first two essays naturally go together because they both probe Zerilli’s account of world-building.
The first essay to appear is by Sarah Tyson, titled “Who Has a Perspective?” As noted in the quoted passage above from Zerilli’s text, central to her account of a democratic theory of judgment is the use of Arendt’s concept of representative thinking. On this score, Tyson is sympathetic to Zerilli’s project, especially as it relates to how judgment might help us navigate the difficult relationship between truth, facts, and the political realm. However, Tyson worries that Zerilli might be too quick to accept Arendt’s account of representative thought without questioning Arendt’s shortsightedness about who counts as having a standpoint. In particular, Native or indigenous peoples might not get to count as having a voice given some of the things that Arendt writes throughout her corpus. Tyson writes: “I am concerned that Zerilli takes up Arendt’s political theory while leaving her anthropology uninterrogated.”
The second essay to appear in the symposium is by Lucy Benjamin, titled “Upon Which Notion of the Earth Do Our Judgments Build Worlds?” Benjamin also welcomes Zerilli’s important insights about the need for turning to Arendt’s thought in light of the loss of a common or shared world, but pushes Zerilli to ask whether she has fully appreciated the implications of Arendt’s notion of “earth.” That is, she asks Zerilli whether she has fully considered how earth-boundedness, the very condition of human biological life, needs to factor into an account of building worlds via judgments. Specifically, Benjamin is uniquely approaching Zerilli’s work from the perspective of climate change and asking: if our condition as earthly creatures is being lost, how does this affect how we form judgments that build worlds?
Clive Barnett’s essay appears third and is a more technical piece, focusing less upon Zerilli’s engagement with Arendt and more on affect within contemporary political theory. “The turn to affect” in political theory is one of the central strands of thought Zerilli herself takes up in Chapter 9 of A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Without delving too far into the particulars here of what is meant by “the turn to affect,” broadly speaking, it is a way of theorizing the political focused less upon the cognitive or epistemological and more upon incorporating phenomenological insights into accounts of the political—in Zerilli’s case, the focus is specifically upon accounts of political judgment not grounded in reason or rationality. Though I have stated Barnett’s piece is a bit more technical, his engagement with Zerilli is close and careful and he brings out an important insight about her specific way of theorizing the political: “Zerilli is concerned with refashioning ‘logical geographies’ that characterize the conceptual frames that shape discussion of human action. By this, I mean that she attends to the ways in which relations between insides and outsides, or between different systems, or between distinct processes are imagined.”
Finally, Shmuel Lederman, while sympathetic to Zerilli’s use of Arendtian themes as they relate to work in contemporary liberal political theory (specifically Habermas and Rawls), pushes her to consider an often neglected aspect of Arendt’s thought: her discussion of the council system. Lederman suggests that the council system is the closest we get in Arendt’s thought to a normative approximation of what the public sphere should look like. Lederman writes the following: “Zerilli’s analysis seems to beg a discussion of the kind of public sphere Arendt herself suggested might be our best chance of recovering a common world in modern societies: radical, participatory democracy in the form of a citizen council system.” Though I’ll leave it to Lederman to expound upon the meaning of this concept in Arendt’s thought, his general point in response to Zerilli is that if we’re going to build a democratic theory of judgment out of Arendt’s thought, it must be participatory in nature.
I am very excited to share this symposium from such a wide range of scholars and interests. I sincerely hope readers will find it as timely and relevant as I have while organizing it.

Building on recent feminist scholarship on the complicity of feminist antiviolence movements in the build up of mass incarceration, this essay analyzes the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by carceral logic, taking the Gender-Responsive Justice and Community Accountability movements as countervailing examples. Both strategies claim to be a feminist response to violence. Gender-Responsive Justice arises from feminist criminology and has genealogical roots in the American prison reformatory movement. Community Accountability stems from grassroots intersectional and decolonial feminisms that are fundamentally at odds with the professionalization and state-centrism of the mainstream antiviolence movement. We argue that Gender-Responsive Justice is a form of carceral humanism that repackages carceral control as the caring provision of social services, while Community Accountability advances a radically creative abolitionist and decolonial project of an irreducibly epistemological order.