This article argues that blacks should reject integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. It distinguishes two aspects of black devaluation: a ‘stigmatization’ aspect that has to do with the fact that blacks are subject to various forms of discrimination, and an aesthetic aspect (‘phenotypic devaluation’) that concerns the aesthetic devaluation of characteristically black phenotypic traits. It identifies four self-worth harms that integration may inflict, and suggests that these may outweigh the benefits of integration. Further, it argues that, while the integrating process may reduce stigmatization, there is less reason to think that it can do the same for phenotypic devaluation.

D. C. Matthew offers an original and important critique of racial integration. His claim that integration will aggravate phenotypic devaluation of blackness, threatening black self-worth, is persuasive. However, his stronger normative argument that blacks should reject integration as a consequence because the potential harms to black self-worth outweigh its purported benefits is less convincing, as it rests on a dubious cost-benefit analysis. Ultimately, I argue that we should resist the impulse to offer a definitive cost-benefit analysis of racial integration in any case, given the uncertainty of such a complex process unfolding in a speculative future.

D. C. Matthew makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate between integrationists and their critics. While Matthew's conclusion that blacks have a duty not to integrate is too strong, his account provides additional reasons why they may not want to integrate. Further reasons to resist integration may be provided by considering the contexts of integration, particularly with respect to the degree of coerciveness that they involve. I argue that resistance to integration should take the form of not only refusing to participate in it but also of engaging in collective political action in the pursuit of racial justice.

In response to D. C. Matthew's article “Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation,” I assess the politics of physical beauty in the intersection between the categories of race and gender. I scrutinize Matthew's contention that being perceived to be physically attractive reliably results in either good treatment or high self-esteem. I argue that, on the contrary, gender can function as a means of social control, in which the appraisal of women's bodies yields neither good treatment nor improves their self-esteem. This problem can persist among self-segregated intra-group racial communities.

I am broadly sympathetic to D. C. Matthew's analysis. However, in what follows, I restrict my remarks to a few areas where I think he either lacks empirical precision, or overstates his case.

D. C. Matthew argues that although integration offers blacks social and economic benefits, it also creates the conditions for phenotypic devaluation that leads to harm against black self-worth and servile behaviour. Therefore, he advises against integration because the resulting self-worth harms outweigh the benefits of integration. I argue that Matthew's cost-benefit calculation against integration lacks the requisite evidence, and amounts to a luxury belief that will result in more harm. Moreover, his interpretation of behaviour — which he construes as being indicative of a lack of self-worth — is unfounded. Further, his cost-benefit calculation results in socially reactionary sexual policing and ideological purity tests.

In “Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation,” I argue that blacks should reject racial integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. Integration will intensify the self-worth harms of stigmatization and phenotypic devaluation by leading blacks to more fully internalize their devaluation, and while the integrating process itself might reduce the former, it may well leave in place the latter. In this paper, I reply to the challenges to these arguments presented by Sharon Stanley, Andrew Valls, Elvira Basevich, Michael Merry, and Ronald Sundstrom.

In Fellow Creatures, Christine Korsgaard claims that human beings ought to treat all sentient animals as ends in themselves. However, in this article, I argue that Korgaard's method goes beyond what a coherent constructivist conception allows, and I claim that we should therefore adopt a Humean rather than a Kantian version of constructivism. I believe that such a conception permits us to hold substantial ethical positions about non-human animals without having to compromise our ontological commitments.

L'ambition de cet article est de restituer la radicalité de l'argument central contre les logiques déviantes que W.V.O. Quine déploie dans Philosophy of Logic. Cet argument a pour objet de mettre au jour l'inanité du concept de logique déviante, c'est-à-dire son caractère dénué de sens. En rendre compte requiert alors de prendre la mesure de sa dimension anti-psychologiste. Nous tâchons ainsi de montrer que le défi le plus radical de Quine ne consiste pas à opposer au logicien déviant que changer de lois logiques, c'est changer la signification des termes de constantes logiques.

Quel statut donner aux calculs et surtout aux figures proposées par Henri Bergson pour expliquer le fonctionnement de la reconnaissance dans Matière et mémoire ? Ce travail suggère que ces calculs et ces figures ne sont pas que des métaphores commodes ; la réalité n'est pas dépourvue d'un certain nombre d’éléments et de grandeurs plus ou moins importantes. Il semble donc possible de supposer qu'après avoir arithmétisé les faits de conscience à l'aide de nombres spéciaux (dans l’Essai), Bergson géométrise l’être spirituel et matériel (dans Matière et mémoire).

This article examines the essence-existence distinction in Spinoza's theory of modes. This distinction is commonly made in two ways. First, essence and existence are separated by cause. Essences are understood to follow vertically from the essence of God, while existence follows horizontally from other modes. I present textual and systematic arguments against such a causal bifurcation. Second, essence and existence are distinguished by their temporal nature. Essence is eternal. Existence is durational. However, in several passages, Spinoza writes that eternity and duration constitute two ways of understanding nature rather than two really distinct aspects of nature.

Le rapport qu'a entretenu G. W. F. Hegel avec la pensée de F. H. Jacobi a été constant. Il s'attarde avant tout à la question du savoir, de la vérité et de sa saisie, immédiate ou médiatisée. Or, l'un des concepts centraux à la pensée de Jacobi, et sur lequel se fonde en un sens sa conception du savoir immédiat, est celui de perception entendue comme saisie du vrai (Wahr-nehmen). C'est en partant de ce concept, largement discuté au chapitre deux de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit, que nous tenterons d’éclairer sous un angle inédit la critique hégélienne de Jacobi.