2024.01.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Katharine Jenkins, Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, Oxford University Press, 2023, 268pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780197666784.
Reviewed by Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire
Katharine Jenkins has artfully stitched together a radically pluralist account of human social kinds using materials drawn from recent work in analytic feminist metaphysics. If the reader is interested in an overview of recent developments in social ontology, Jenkins’ book would be a good place to start. In addition, Jenkins identifies and defines two novel kinds of ontological wrongs, namely ontic injustice and ontic oppression, a species of ontic injustice. Jenkins argues that an individual can be the victim of ontic injustice simply in virtue of being a member of a social kind when the constraints and enablements which constitute (or partially constitute) the kind are wrongful to the individual (3, 46). Borrowing an idea from Jean Hampton (1991), Jenkins argues that kind membership can…
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