Papers by Rebekah Sinclair
Women's Studies, Jun 1, 2013
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Environmental Philosophy, 2019
My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida's claim that bio-political and sovereign po... more My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida's claim that bio-political and sovereign power use species taxonomies to performatively depoliticize and ignore the reciprocity of creaturely perspectives; and 2) argues Derrida makes possible a deconstruction of species, and demonstrates its necessity for better political futures. To do this, I follow Derrida's criticism of autopsic logics and the circularity of metaphysics and zoology, and his affirmation of embodied singularity. Finally, I start and end with analyses of cetacean suicide: by privileging how others see themselves and us over our perspective of them, Derrida challenges what counts as political and who decides.
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Process studies, Oct 1, 2013
Poststructuralism and Whiteheadian process thought each uniquely dismantle the anthropocentric hi... more Poststructuralism and Whiteheadian process thought each uniquely dismantle the anthropocentric hierarchies and speciesed constructions we have used to (mis)calculate our ethics with non-human bodies. Yet each perspective uniquely continues, despite its own affirmations, to privilege the identity and construction of the human over other bodies. In an effort to move past these shortcomings and into a more creative ethical imagination, this article reads Whiteheadian metaphysics as an affirmation of poststructural singularity, and uses poststructural criticism to deconstruct Whitehead’s subtler form of anthropocentrism. By joining these traditions together, this article makes clear their respective blind spots, moves past the limited and troubled framework of species upheld in each, and advances the truly novel, creaturely relations for which both traditions adamantly call.
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Berghahn Books, Mar 11, 2022
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Ajob Neuroscience, May 7, 2021
Proponents of moral enhancement present this biotechnology as a viable solution to social and pol... more Proponents of moral enhancement present this biotechnology as a viable solution to social and political problems. The projected imperative to enhance ourselves morally is a direct response to our perceived moral unfitness (Persson and Savulescu 2012). Our present moral traits are seen as unable to adequately promote large-scale cooperation, which is necessary to appreciate the consequences of dangerous technological developments and to address current existential problems such as global climate change. Fabiano aims to provide a “safety framework” for the appropriate application of moral enhancement through the following requirements: practical robustness to moral uncertainty, empirical adequacy, balance between dispositions, preservation of identity, and sensitivity to practical considerations. Fabiano argues that virtue theory best attends to these desiderata and illuminates how the safety framework is to be adequately applied. When moral enhancement draws on virtue theory, an intervention can be made into the agent’s moral behaviors and character traits, so that they can actually achieve the good (Fabiano 2021). While we welcome Fabiano’s safety framework as a response to some of the challenges of moral enhancement, we believe it faces certain limitations for adequately addressing and averting the very catastrophic social events which call for enhancement in the first place. Specifically, we take issue with the tendency—found in Fabiano, in moral enhancement debates, and in virtue ethics more broadly—to overemphasize the role of individual behavior in addressing moral problems. Fabiano acknowledges that moving from the individual to the collective remains a difficulty for moral enhancement theory. Yet unlike some of the other concerns that Fabiano’s safety framework explicitly aims to mitigate, this key concern remains unaddressed. We believe this issue cannot be sidestepped. Instead, we claim that any argument in favor of moral enhancement, or safety framework hoping to abate its challenges, will not sufficiently address large scale moral crises like climate change unless it effectively articulates a theory of enhancement (virtue or otherwise) as both (1) collectively oriented and (2) sufficient to address the complex nature of global problems.
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Berghahn Books, Mar 11, 2022
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Proponents of moral enhancement present this biotechnology as a viable solution to social and pol... more Proponents of moral enhancement present this biotechnology as a viable solution to social and political problems. The projected imperative to enhance ourselves morally is a direct response to our perceived moral unfitness (Persson and Savulescu 2012). Our present moral traits are seen as unable to adequately promote large-scale cooperation, which is necessary to appreciate the consequences of dangerous technological developments and to address current existential problems such as global climate change. Fabiano aims to provide a “safety framework” for the appropriate application of moral enhancement through the following requirements: practical robustness to moral uncertainty, empirical adequacy, balance between dispositions, preservation of identity, and sensitivity to practical considerations. Fabiano argues that virtue theory best attends to these desiderata and illuminates how the safety framework is to be adequately applied. When moral enhancement draws on virtue theory, an inte...
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The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020
Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other is filled with attention to fluids: seas, shore... more Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other is filled with attention to fluids: seas, shores, floods, canals, waves, rivers, and tsunamis all meander through and soak its pages. Against the metaphysical privilege of substance, I argue Derrida deploys these waters to clarify the role of différance, the failure of self-identity, and the relation between autobiography, land, and citizenship. Specifically, by attending to Derrida's discussion of water, I argue Monolingualism both questions the possibility of autobiography in light of the elemental nature of language and identity, and critiques colonial ontopological configurations that secure belonging through the solidity and fixity of land and borders (or border walls). Turning then to the U.S.-Mexico border, I use Derrida's liquid logic to clarify and problematize the way migrants and refugees are made intelligible as ontopological failures through their association with water and water metaphors (i.e., “flows” or “wave...
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Environmental Philosophy, 2019
My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida's claim that bio-political and sovereign po... more My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida's claim that bio-political and sovereign power use species taxonomies to performatively depoliticize and ignore the reciprocity of creaturely perspectives; and 2) argues Derrida makes possible a deconstruction of species, and demonstrates its necessity for better political futures. To do this, I follow Derrida's criticism of autopsic logics and the circularity of metaphysics and zoology, and his affirmation of embodied singularity. Finally, I start and end with analyses of cetacean suicide: by privileging how others see themselves and us over our perspective of them, Derrida challenges what counts as political and who decides.
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Environment and Society, 2018
Controlling the names of places, environments, and species is one way in which settler colonial o... more Controlling the names of places, environments, and species is one way in which settler colonial ontologies delimit the intelligibility of ecological relations, Indigenous peoples, and environmental injustices. To counter this, this article amplifies the voices of Native American scholars and foregrounds a philosophical account of Indigenous naming. First, I explore some central characteristics of Indigenous ontology, epistemic virtue, and ethical responsibility, setting the stage for how Native naming draws these elements together into a complete, robust philosophy. Then I point toward leading but contingent principles of Native naming, foregrounding how Native names emerge from and create communities by situating (rather than individuating) the beings that they name within kinship structures, including human and nonhuman agents. Finally, I outline why and how Indigenous names and the knowledges they contain are crucial for both resisting settler violence and achieving environmental...
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Hypatia, 2020
Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indige... more Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a relational, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand t...
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The Pluralist
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Environmental Ethics, 2020
The voices of Native American philosophers, scientists, and storytellers need to be amplified to ... more The voices of Native American philosophers, scientists, and storytellers need to be amplified to problematize and decolonize the often taken-for-granted concept of species in environmental ethics. Especially in the context of climate change, concepts such as cross-species native,invasive, and endangered species have become cornerstones for understanding and evaluating moral obligations to other lives.Yet, even as the species concept does ethical work, it has not itself been subject to critical ethical evaluation. Instead, uncritical treatment of the species concept can naturalize Western metaphysical conceptual habits in ways that both support settler colonial organization of the world and conflict with Indigenous ontological and ethico-epistemological understandings of species. This can be especially problematic as scientists and environmentalists increasingly seek to engage Indigenous knowledge of particular species (for the purposes of conservation, for example) while assuming th...
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Recent Publications by Rebekah Sinclair
Hypatia, 2020
Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of femi-nism, Indig... more Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of femi-nism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, mas-culinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent-many-valued-logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a rela-tional, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand the arenas in which allied feminists can responsibly take up and deploy these decolonial logics. This essay emphasizes the important role Indigenous paraconsistent logics play within Indigenous philosophies more broadly, and specifically as tools for understanding difficult , often conflicting truths about political, ethical, and ecological relations. Indigenous logics organize and witness important if seemingly inconsistent realities otherwise obscured or sometimes even perpetuated by classical logic. Thus responsibly engaging Indigenous philosophy means understanding and affirming paraconsistent logics, which provide unique resources for decolonial resistance, and for better seeing and engaging the complexities of identities and our world. Despite the stated importance of logic for many Native scholars, very little attention is given to Indigenous logics and the role they play in organizing Indigenous ontological and epistemological practices. Nor is due attention given to the way Native logics decolonize both a universal conception of reason and its everyday operation in the material world. Perhaps this lack of attention is in part because of broader skepticism about the abstract projects and implicit values of a particular group of logics, collectively called classical logic. Classical logic is arguably deeply Eurocentric and patriarchal, despite its claims to be the most pure, neutral, and objective form of reasoning,
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Environmental Philosophy, 2019
My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida's claim that bio-political and sovereign power use ... more My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida's claim that bio-political and sovereign power use species taxonomies to performatively depoliticize and ignore the reciprocity of creaturely perspectives; and 2) argues Derrida makes possible a deconstruction of species, and demonstrates its necessity for better political futures. To do this, I follow Derrida's criticism of autopsic logics and the circularity of metaphysics and zoology, and his affirmation of embodied singularity. Finally, I start and end with analyses of cetacean suicide: by privileging how others see themselves and us over our perspective of them, Derrida challenges what counts as political and who decides.
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Environment and Society, 2018
Controlling the names of places, environments, and species is one way in which settler colonial o... more Controlling the names of places, environments, and species is one way in which settler colonial ontologies delimit the intelligibility of ecological relations, Indigenous peoples, and environmental injustices. To counter this, this article amplifi es the voices of Native American scholars and foregrounds a philosophical account of Indigenous naming. First, I explore some central characteristics of Indigenous ontology, epis-temic virtue, and ethical responsibility, setting the stage for how Native nami ng draws these elements together into a complete, robust philosophy. Th en I point toward leading but contingent principles of Native naming, foregrounding how Native names emerge from and create communities by situating (rather than individuating) the beings that they name within kinship structures, including human and nonhuman agents. Finally, I outline why and how Indigenous names and the knowledges they contain are crucial for both resisting settler violence and achieving environmental justice, not only for Native Americans, but for their entire animate communities. A name is a site of power. Th is is true in part because of the concrete power-oft en political , hierarchical, statist, and colonial-that determines who gets to name whom. But for many American Indian philosophies, names also come with their own power; names have power to create or destroy worlds, build or raze relationships, and embed their bearers in networks of being and meaning that extend far beyond the "human. " Furthermore, acts of naming in Native philosophies do not simply pick out singular, complete entities; rather, naming is a humble, communal, educational enactment of the ways in which Native Americans know and relate to their world and each other. Th is diff ers from dominant, settler colonial philosophies in which, according to Saul Kripke, names individuate and pick out entities from their environment rather than situate and embed them within it. As Viola Cordova suggests, Western names tend to refer to "static nouns" (2007: 100). Names enclose and capture unifi ed, essential identities in exclusive possession of defi nable and stable traits, consistent in time and space. Th ey designate individuals, not a relational node in a network, a personality that can shift between bodies, or a complex multiplicity. In Western philosophy, naming is connected to a particular ontology that understands individuals as the fundamental units of reality and thus of ecology, biology, anthropology, politics, ethics, law, and so on.
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Guests, Pests, or Terrorists: Speciesed Ethics and the Colonial Intelligibility of "Invasive" Others, 2016
Available in the edited volume, The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology, Edited by James Stan... more Available in the edited volume, The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology, Edited by James Stanescue and Kevin Cummings.
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Papers by Rebekah Sinclair
Recent Publications by Rebekah Sinclair