Profile

Naomi Zack received  her  PhD  in  Philosophy  from  Columbia University and has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon since 2001. Zack’s newest book is The Theory of Applicative Justice: An Empirical Pragmatic Approach to Correcting Racial Injustice (2016). Related recent books are: White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of US Police Racial Profiling and Homicide (2015) and The  Ethics  and  Mores  of  Race:  Equality after the History of Philosophy (2011, 2015). Additional monographs include: Ethics for Disaster (2009, 2010), Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality (2005), the short textbook, Thinking About Race, 1998, 2006); Bachelors  of  Science: 17^th Century Identity Then and Now  (1996);  Philosophy  of Science and Race (2002); Race  and Mixed  Race  (1993). Most recent is a 51-contributor Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race (January, 2017).

            Zack has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses at the University at Albany, SUNY and the University of Oregon, including ethics, existentialism, newly designed courses on disaster and homelessness, as well as seminars on race, early modern philosophers, the history of political and moral philosophy, and twentieth century analytic philosophy. Zack generally considers herself a common-sense philosopher, able to engage both abstract and real world problems with methods from a plurality of traditions. Her early work on race focused on the biological emptiness of human racial categories and the conundrum of mixed-race identities (especially black and white mixed race). But since 2010, Zack’s work on race has been more broadly concerned with concrete injustice and abstract theories of injustice that extend beyond race. Recent interviews about her critique of white privilege discourse include: PhilosophyTalk.org, “White Privilege and Racial Justice,” Feb. 14, 2016, http://philosophytalk.org/shows/white-privilege-and-racial-injustice; Interview about critique of white privilege discourse on PRI, “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” Oct. 17, 2015. http://www.ttbook.org/book/lets-stop-talking-about-privilege; “What ‘White Privilege’ Really Means,” Interview by George Yancy in New York Times, Opinionator, Stone.http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/ November 5, 2014.

Zack’s treatment of disaster emphasizes the ethical dimensions of obligatory preparation and her emerging scholarly work on home and homelessness proceeds from a class-based, contemporary cosmopolitan perspective, as does her treatment of feminist issues. Zack has organized the project on home and homelessness for the University   of   Oregon   Philosophy   Department, and maintains the multimedia website: http://homelessness.philosophy.uoregon.edu/.