This essay is an attempt to determine what Robert Bernasconi’s body of work in Critical Philosophy of Race can teach us about the way in which we, philosophers and professors of philosophy, ought to treat our institutional heritage. What should we make, for instance, of moral claims made by philosophers of the modern era who – tacitly or explicitly – manifested certain levels of endorsement toward the Atlantic Slave Trade? How should we comprehend the conceptual tools that we have inherited from them, knowing that those were formulated alongside justificatory claims for the enslavement of Africans – claims that we now deem undoubtably and universally immoral? I extract from Bernasconi’s writings an implicit methodology that can be broken down into three main moves: (1) a historiographical work, akin to Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ method, aimed at uncovering the material conditions that allowed for the emergence of philosophical ideas of the past, (2) a dialectical work aimed at interpreting this collection of historical data through the critical lens of race, and (3) a pedagogical work aimed at transforming the practice of academic philosophy in light of the critique. I conclude that his methodological contribution culminates in an invitation to revisit and transform the past of the institution by treating the history of academic philosophy as philosophically and conceptually relevant rather than merely incidental. Such a commitment toward critically engaging the past of our institution urges us to revisit the canon in specific ways.

This article considers the normative and critical value of popular comedy. I begin by assembling and evaluating a range of political theory literature on comedy. I argue that popular comedy can be conducive to both critical and transformative democratic effects, but that these effects are contingent on the way comedic performances are received by audiences. I illustrate this by means of a case study of a comedic climate change ‘debate’ from the television show, Last Week Tonight. Drawing from recent scholarship on deliberation, judgment and rhetoric, I highlight both critical and transformative dimensions of the performance. I attribute these to the vignette’s likely reception, which I describe as ‘dissonant’ – unresolved, affectively turbulent and aesthetically attuned. I argue that comedy is uniquely positioned to spur such ‘dissonant’ modes of engagement and, in so doing, to promote acknowledgement and reflective judgment.

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper considers the populist surges of our times in three countries: Trump’s America, Brexit Britain, and Modi’s India, distinguishing the special features of each, and philosophically and politically analyzing the relations that populism bears to both liberalism and the capitalist political economies of liberal-democratic societies.

This article gives an overview of 4 important lacunae in political liberalism and identifies, in a preliminary fashion, some trends in the literature that can come in for support in filling these blind spots, which prevent political liberalism from a correct assessment of the diverse nature of religious claims. Political liberalism operates with implicit assumptions about religious actors being either ‘liberal’ or ‘fundamentalist’ and ignores a third, in-between group, namely traditionalist religious actors and their claims. After having explained what makes traditionalist religious actors different from liberal and fundamentalist religious actors, the author develops 4 areas in which political liberalism should be pushed further theoretically in order to correctly theorize the challenge which traditional religious actors pose to liberal democracy. These 4 areas (blind spots) are: (1) the context of translation; (2) the politics of exemptions; (3) the multivocality of theology; and (4) the transnational nature of norm-contestation.

The paper explores the role played by concepts of temporality in shaping the self’s identity and its moral responsibility. This theme is examined in both Kant and Benjamin, two theorists who view the modern self as an essentially historical being. For Kant, teleological and uniform time shoulders the heightening of the self’s universal attributes and the constant expansion of a moral community. The desired end is the establishment of an integrated and homogeneous human space, a cosmopolitan stage wherein history is finally redeemed. This progressive notion of time is seen as dangerous by Benjamin, since it generates forgetfulness and inner impoverishment of the self. Instead, Benjamin advances a fragmented conception of time, one allowing conversation between distant moments and grounding identity in concrete images. While the poetic recovery of memory leads to the distinct and exclusive, Benjamin follows Kant in demanding universal moral responsibility of the self. However, Benjamin’s strategy, so to speak, is the integration of our temporal - not spatial - experience.