ALLS: Alain Leroy Locke Society

Forthcoming Manuscript:
Reconciliation, Respect, and Tolerance in the Philosophy of Alain Locke

Patrick Goodin, “Philosophy, Art, and the Politics of Locke’s New Negro”

Goodin first outlines several features of Aristotle’s metaphysics, particular the concepts that require a the existence of immutable qualities. He then considers Locke’s critique of metaphysics and absolutism. In contrast, Goodin then performs a classical Socratic dialogue between Aristotle and Locke. The focus is on the way Locke’s metaphysical pluralism is a defeater of Aristotelian type metaphysics.

Chielozona Eze, “The Pitfalls of Cultural Consciousness: Alain Locke’s Critique of Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual”

Harold Cruse often considered Locke's ideas of culture before the publication of his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. However, Eze engages in a Socratic dialogue between Cruse and Locke regarding the kind of values needed to transcend cultural discords that involve incongruities of valuations creating intolerance.

Mark Hebling, “Alain Locke: Philosophy, Tolerance, and the Pragmatic Personality”

Hebling argues that Locke’s creates an alternative mode of social critique and cultural evaluation, one that relies on a nascent concept of personality. Considering an array of authors developing alternative approaches to popular methods of class analysis or appeal to paradigms of Victorian moral perfectionism, Hebling offers a novel reading of literary and cultures material from the renaissance. In so doing, he considers the role of personality in supporting a view of tolerance.

Gino Pellegrini, “Alain Locke and Multicultural Identity”

Pellegrini contends that “Locke’s conception of “culture-citizen” in its contingency, fluidity, and contradiction is I think present in the expression of self-identified multiracial.” Pellegrini considers Locke’s conception of race, social identities and cosmopolitanism. His considers the features of each of particular importance for a viable appreciation of multiracial identity that is sufficiently pliable to account for the vicissitudes of multiracial realities.

Arnold L. Farr, “Beyond Repressive Tolerance: Alain Locke’s Hermeneutics of Democracy as a Response to Herbert Marcuse’s Deconstruction of the Same”

Greg Moses, "Functional relativism and human rights"

Alain Locke proposed a culturally embedded method of assessing human activity that he termed "functional relativism". During the same era, concepts of universal human rights were being formulated and institutionalized. This chapter will argue that Locke's method of functional relativsm provides an enriching approach to understanding human rights and their universalizability.”

Leonard Harris, "Tolerance and Self-Defense"

Harris argues that forgiveness is neither a virtue, nor benevolence a response to injustice necessarily more consolatory than indignation. Harris contends that indignation is, under some circumstance, a moral good. In this regard, he considers boundaries and examples that would make a Lockean approach to valuation inclusive of value options other than those associated with the pacifist tradition.