Philosophy 2120K:
 Slurs and Hate Speech
  

Readings

There are two required books:

I did not order either of these from the bookstore, but we will not need them for some time yet. You should get copies from your favorite bookseller.

There are a couple other books you might also think about getting. We'll be reading a few papers that are reprinted in Rae Langton's Sexual Solipsism, and a couple that are reprinted in Judith Butler's Exciteable Speech.

The other readings are available via the links on this website. Where possible, links are to publicly available sources, but some are available only to enrolled students and require a username and password.

Reading the Readings

To view the PDFs, you will of course need a PDF reader, which you probably already have.

Some of the files are only available in DjVu, however. Why DjVu? Because DjVu is a file format specifically designed for scanned text: The DjVu encoder produces files that are typically much smaller than the corresponding PDFs, typically about one tenth the size, when dealing with scanned text.

To read the DjVu files, you will need a DjVu reader. Browser plugins for Windows and Mac OSX are available from Celartem. Many Linux users will already have a DjVu reader, since Okular (which is part of the KDE graphics module) supports DjVu. There is also a dedicated DjVu reader for Linux that can usually be installed via the djvulibre package. (Source code and packages are available at SourceForge, or you can install the package using your distro's package management system.) A list of other DjVu resources is maintained at djvu.org.

Several of the eBook readers available for iOS and Android also support DjVu. For iOS the most popular of these seems to be Stanza, though I do not use iOS and so have no relevant knowledge myself. For Android, the best I have found is EBookDroid, which is a truly remarkable product. Among other things, it will split "two per page" landscape pages into single pages and automatically crop to the text area (thus maximizing font size), just to start. Unfortunately, this has now become closed-source, though it is still free to use (free as in beer, but not as in speech).

NOTE: When printing these files, make sure you print them in the correct mode: ‘landscape’ or ‘portrait’. In particular, two-to-a-page scanned pages should be printed in landscape mode, so that they come out the way they were photocopied. You will get very small text and a lot of blank paper if you print them portrait.

Richard Heck Department of Philosophy Brown University