"The Practical Attitude of a Situated Self"
This paper attempts to explore and critique ways of pursuing a philosophy that favours a pluralistic view of reality and acknowledges experiential diversity. It does so by focusing on the idea of the situated self. Since the modern era, the self has often been conceived as autonomous, independent, and detachable from the situational context. This traditional metaphysical view posits that reality, in which independent selves may contingently be situated, is universally accessible and objective. In recent decades, critics across diverse philosophical backgrounds have challenged this conception of the self, highlighting instead the self’s relational and situated nature - fundamentally intertwined with the other(s) and the environment rather than existing in isolation.
Would today’s philosophers be able to depict reality in a way that makes different selves’ situatedness manifest well? Such attempts uncover a difficulty: it seems that the philosopher’s depiction, no matter how well argued, always obscures their situatedness as a depicter, inadvertently (re)asserting the superiority, if not universality, of their own standpoint.
I start by examining the implications of the above difficulty in the context of philosophers’ advocacy for epistemic humility, drawing on Kant’s philosophical framework and critiques thereof. Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy, which is often valued due to its acknowledging the limitation of human experience, ironically reinforces the centrality it aims to dismantle by not adequately addressing the self’s interdependency with its surroundings. Methodologies of reasoning like Kant’s are now globally prevalent in today’s philosophical practice due to the influence of the modern west, and they have resulted in various forms of eurocentrism and anthropocentrism.
I argue that the difficulty is unlikely to be dodged insofar as one maintains a subtractive conception of realities other than one’s own. It would neither work if we abstractly acknowledge that all realities are equal, as this would either lead to the false projection of our own self onto the other(s), or obstruct us from understanding the other(s) as existing in a shared reality. A situated self must always understand and re-understand the diverse relationships it shares with the other(s), meaning that it must be open to - and often grapple with - the shifting dynamics that affect itself.
"Re-Politicising Standpoint Epistemology"
This paper makes a critical comment on Emily Tilton and Briana Toole’s suggestion that standpoint epistemology should be understood as calling for inclusion, instead of deference. I argue that their strategy lacks the practical efficacy they aim for because the normative guidance they provide, according to which the socially dominant should give special weight to the testimony of the marginalised when the testimony is on a topic relevant to the marginalisation, can lead to the same harmful effects as deference norms - that is, a reinforcement of the unjust status quo. The lack of efficacy is caused by their strategy’s shared anti-political feature with deference norms, a feature which implicitly commits to the essentialist view of epistemic standpoints and suffers from a self-referential type of trap. I further argue that standpoint epistemology must be (re)politicised, meaning that it must not only call for inclusion but, more importantly, for an understanding across social groups that can break free from the institutional norms that have systematically normalised certain social divisions in the first place. The way such an understanding is achieved cannot be guaranteed by any theoretical guidance alone. It requires a collective acknowledgement by all the involved participants that injustice against the most marginalised is injustice to all. I hope this piece of writing can serve as a reminder that standpoint epistemology has always been - and should continue to be - a contributor to political projects aimed at breaking down barriers between social groups and addressing the injustices inherent in how these groups have been divided. Standpoint epistemology is not merely about interpreting existing epistemic practices; it is about interrogating and transforming them.
"Can a Revolution Fail?"
This essay starts from the phenomenon that most of today’s people are pessimistic about Haiti, the nation born out of a revolution fought by enslaved people against the colonists, in that there seems to be no hope for Haiti to be a successful state agent in the global system, given the current conditions. A question can then be raised about whether such pessimism should lead us to view the Haitian Revolution as a failure, and more generally, whether any revolution can be considered a failure. I take it that any adequate answer must simultaneously be explicit in how meaning or telos is attributed to a revolution and how a revolution is identified. I examine some of the most popular interpretations of the Haitian Revolution with an eye to how each of them addresses these questions, and I conclude that these interpretations are likely to judge the Haitian Revolution a failure. Instead of an acknowledgment of the Haitian Revolution’s failure and, therefore, the possibility of any revolution’s failure, I argue that the common conception of revolutions held by these interpretations is self-limiting and opportunist because they are overly committed to that a revolution can only succeed if it makes progress in world history strictly in the way endorsed by how the revolution is retroactively identified and understood. Finally, I suggest an alternative view of world history, according to which we are not mere passive witnesses of historical progress but practical actors in history, and this view allows us to engage in our identified revolutions, act as if they can never fail but only be incomplete, and fight for historical progress even without full knowledge of what that may look like.
"Stoic Therapy and Existentialism: A Constitutivist Interpretation"
Stoic ethics is often characterised by its progressive feature: instead of giving specific instructions on what to do in order to achieve a happy life, it focuses on a kind of progress in which its practitioners gradually build resilience and make their soul (ψυχή) less vulnerable. Being eudaimonists, the Stoics believe that achieving eudaimonia is equivalent to becoming an ideal Stoic Sage. The image of the Stoic Sage is portrayed as one who is perfectly rational. All of us, mere (potential) Stoic progressors, are always on our way to approach the ideal, and we have to constantly reflect on ourselves and reform our beliefs. Scholars and public readers of Stoicism have suggested that the process of a Stoic practitioner’s progress is analogous to a kind of therapy. For the most part, they tend to link this Stoic therapy with the Stoics’ idea of transforming irrational passions (πάθη) into rational/good feelings (ευπάθεια). This aspect attracts many readers to endorse Stoic ethics because they believe that being free from passions and emotions leads to a more authentic life. Meanwhile, this aspect is also questioned by many readers because those readers don’t find such a transformation desirable. Even worse, they complain that a Stoic ideal must be an “unfeeling cold fish” whose life is not worth pursuing.
This paper attempts to address the “cold-fish” complaint. The cut-through for doing it, I suggest, does not lie in the Stoics’ view of passion and emotions, but in their claim of external things being indifferent. This is for two reasons. First, the indifference claim bridges the Stoic view of nature and Stoic therapy, making the former a cognitive ground for the latter. I argue that Stoic therapy is better understood as a cognitive reform that can be mapped onto a specific period of everyone's natural development, which can be explained by a narrative derived from the Stoic view of nature. A natural constitutivist response to the initial question can then be constructed. Second, the Stoic claim on the indifferents easily leads us to think that the Stoics act without feeling involved in the action. I suggest that the Stoic claim on the indifferents, under my constitutivist interpretation, entails a practical attitude parallel to that which is championed by the existentialists, Kierkegaard and Heidegger in particular. Such a practical attitude guides the agent to act resolutely - that is, with total effort and without reservation - and therefore the (mis)conception of Stoicism that treats it as advocating detachment or disinvolvement should dissolve.