In this incisive political analysis, Kristin Ross thinks through everyday existence across a range of practices-from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction-and across the forms taken by collective political action in contemporary struggles. Ross returns to Henri Lefebvre's powerful intuition that ordinary life is both residue and resource, the site of profound alienation and, by the same token, the origin of all emancipatory initiatives and desires.

"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" -/- In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown (...) discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. -/- Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate. (shrink)

"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses (...) the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

This paper is based on the comments I gave to Alfred Mele regarding his original Zygote Argument during my presentation at a small workshop on manipulation arguments in Budapest back in 2012. After those comments, Mele changed the conclusion of his original Zygote Argument (OZA) from a positive, explanatory conclusion to a negative, non-explanatory conclusion--and, correspondingly, redefined 'incompatibilism' so that it would no longer refer in his work to the view that determinism precludes (undermines, eliminates, destroys, etc.) free will, but (...) refers narrowly to the perhaps spurious association claim that appears in the conclusion of the revised Zygote Argument (Mele 2013+). Yet, over the last decade, Mele has made no comment in print about the changes he made, the invalidity objection that led to them, nor to the fact that his revised Zygote Argument was originally presented by me as a (non-optimal) reaction to my invalidity objection to his original Zygote Argument. To my knowledge, Mele has only mentioned this 2015 paper once, at it was not in the context of understanding manipulation arguments; it was, rather, in the context of defending his revised, non-explanatory definition of 'incompatibilism' at the opening of Aspects of Agency (p. 6, n. 4). There, Mele singles out *just this 2015 paper* as a place where they'll find what Mele degrades as a type of nonstandard/nontraditional definition of 'incompatibilism' that he rejects. This is notable because Mele provides no empirical evidence that his preferred definition is standard, and most (including Lehrer, who coined the term) reject the negative, non-explanatory, association-based definition that Mele came to endorse in the aftermath of my invalidity objection to OZA. So, if Mele had a genuine concern about philosophers who use the term 'incompatibilism', then Mele could have--and should have--named almost any leading figure in free will for this purpose (since most--including Pereboom, Vihvelin, Haji, etc.) reject the non-explanatory definition that Mele-2013+ now endorses. Yet, for untold reasons, Mele isolated the working definition of 'incompatibilism' used in one paper by one unemployed junior researcher to use as his example--even though Neil Levy had used this same definition in previously published work (eg. Levy 2011). Moreover, if Mele were genuinely interested in helping his readers understand the ambiguity of terms like 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' it is a mystery that he referenced a paper in which nothing of substance hung on the definitions given to these terms -- especially considering that he might have instead pointed them to my OTHER 2015 paper, "A Critique of Vihvelin's Three-Fold Classification" in which the MAIN AIM of the paper is to expose the difficulties facing anyone who wants to define the terms 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' in a way that everyone will accept (including a critique of the negative, non-explanatory "incompossibilist" definition that Mele adopted after my objection to OZA). By all appearances, Mele's main aim in citing specifically THIS paper and none of my other work was to give readers the false impression that my working definition of 'incompatibilism' played some role in my charge that his argument is invalid (which it doesn't, given that the term doesn't appear in either the premises or conclusion of that argument). Mele adds to this unseemly rhetorical campaign in his book *Manipulation Agents* where he mentions an invalidity objection in the intro (p. 84) and then discusses that objection in the final lines of Chapter 5 of the book (p. 120-121). The invalidity objection discussed here is completely pedantic, has never been seriously raised in the primary literature (and was previously addressed in multiple places my multiple philosophers, including me), and has nothing whatever to do with my invalidity objection. In other words, Mele was content to discuss an invalidity objection that no one has ever had to an argument that is clearly valid while completely ignoring the ONLY substantive invalidity objection to his argument in print. This is unfortunate, because it has led to serious confusion --including the patently false description of my invalidity objection to OZA as an objection to the revised version of the Zygote Argument that Mele adopted in *response* my objection (e.g., Capes mistakenly claims "Mickelson (2015) contends that arguments like this [i.e. like the revised Zygote Argument] are invalid. But that’s because she defines “incompatibilism” differently than I’ve defined it here" in his "Manipulation Arguments and Direct Arguments" chapter in the 2023 Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Free Will; I did not say this, and the definition of 'incompatibilism' is irrelevant to my objection). In "The Zygote Argument Is Invalid--Now What?", I simply use the invalidity of the simple 2-premise Zygote Argument as a foil to make a series of more philosophically significant points (e.g. regarding the dialectical structure of the free-will debate, the role of best-explanation reasoning, and to develop the first-ever "master manipulation argument"). Mele has yet to address my reasons for calling attention to the non-trivial invalidity of his OZA or to any of my answers to the "Now What?" question in this paper, even though this question and my proposed answers to this question are the paper's main point. For those interested in a more recent discussion of how the logical and metaphilosophical observations made in this "Now What?" paper have helped to move the free-will debate forward, I suggest looking at the discussions of the "paradigm shift" in the free-will debate that helps to explain why the free-will debate has become mired in stalemates and empty verbal disputes that are found, for example, in my contributions to the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Free Will (Intro and Chapter 4, 2023) and my paper "Free Will, Self-Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck" (2019). (shrink)

Ross, Alf Loar, Brian, Editor.Directives and Norms. New York: Humanities Press, [1967]. ix, 188 pp. Reprint available April 2009 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-961-2. ISBN-10: 1-58477-961-6. Cloth with dust jacket. $65.00 * Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (...) (1958) are his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physiological states. However, this assumption, on the part of philosophers or vision scientists, has the effect of simply ruling out certain versions of functionalism. While (...) Nida-Rümelin is quite right to search for empirical tests for claims about the nature of visual states, philosophical issues remain pivotal in determining the correctness of these claims. (shrink)

The acknowledgement of basic human vulnerability in relationships between mental health service users and professionals working in community-based mental health services (in Norway) was a starting point. The purpose was to explore how users of these services describe and make sense of their meetings with other people. The research is collaborative, with researcher and person with experienced-based knowledge cooperating through the research process. Data is derived from 19 interviews with 11 people who depend on mental health services for assistance at (...) least three times a week. Data is analysed according to the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results confirm that reciprocity is fundamental for relationships, and that recognizing the individual entails personal involvement. The participants describe a struggle, and recognizing this struggle may help the professional to achieve a deeper understanding of the individual. (shrink)

The Right and the Good, a classic of twentieth-century philosophy by the great scholar Sir David Ross, is now presented in a new edition with a substantial introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, a leading expert on Ross. Ross's book is the pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, which was the dominant moral theory in British philosophy for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intuitionism is now enjoying a considerable revival, and Stratton-Lake provides the context for a proper understanding (...) of Ross's great work today. (shrink)

Paternalistic interventions restrict individuals’ liberty or autonomy so as to guide their decisions towards options that are more beneficial for them than the ones they would choose in the absence of such interventions. Although some philosophers have emphasised that there is a case for justifiable paternalism in certain circumstances, much of contemporary moral and political philosophy works from a strong presumption against paternalistic interventions. However, Richard Arneson has argued that there are egalitarian reasons that support the case for paternalism: paternalistic (...) interventions can protect poor decision-makers from making ‘bad’ choices, thus preventing inequalities between them and those with better decision-making skills. This paper seeks to clarify and advance our understanding of the egalitarian argument for paternalism. Arneson’s argument adds an important and often neglected dimension to the debate about paternalism but also raises a number of questions about equality, paternalism and the relationship between the two. (shrink)

Original essays by leading philosophers of science explore the question of whether metaphysics can and should be naturalized--conducted as part of natural science.

Ereignet sich anstelle von Klang oder Sprache, Musik oder Lärm lediglich Stille oder vielmehr das, was wir für Stille halten, kommt ein unerwartetes Aufmerken in Gang. Die Stille kann auffordern, genauer hinzuhören, aber auch genauer hinzusehen. Ein plötzliches Aufmerken geschieht jedoch nur, wenn die Stille den Wahrnehmenden unerwartet trifft. Einer im Alltäglichen zumeist durch die Priorität des Bewussten, Bekannten oder Vertrauten untergeordneten Stille, können Arbeiten, wie jene von Aernout Mik, eine konkrete Erfahrbarkeit geben. Was er erfahrbar werden lässt, ist aber (...) nicht die Stille, sondern das, was in der Regel überhört wird. In der Verkehrung des vermeintlich Unhörbaren in ein Hörbares zeigt sich mit der Stille ein Möglichkeitsraum, dessen Besonderheit die Autorin mit der Frage, was sich in der Erfahrung von Stille zeigt, nachgeht. Ist also von einer Stille als ästhetischem Phänomen die Rede, ist nicht eine Stille innerhalb der Rezeption genuin stiller Kunstwerke gemeint, sondern der bewusste Entzug des Auditiven. Damit widerspricht die Autorin zugleich einer Vorstellung von Stille als mess- oder bestimmbarer Grösse und stellt die Stille aus der ästhetischen Erfahrung heraus ins Zentrum ihrer Betrachtungen. (shrink)

This much-anticipated work is a rich and insightful collection of essays that restores women and minorities to the arena of political theory and debate.

This book examines the ways that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy adopt and reconfigure the Kantian understanding of "aesthetic presentation." In Kant, "aesthetic presentation" is understood in a technical sense as a specific mode of experience within a typology of different spheres of experience. This study argues that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy generalize the elements of this specific mode of experience so that the aesthetic attitude and the vocabulary used by Kant to describe it are brought to bear on things in (...) general. The book goes beyond documenting the well-known influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment , however, to open up a new way of approaching some of the central issues in post-Kantian thought—including why it is that art, the art work, and the aesthetic are still available as a vehicle of critique even, or especially, after Auschwitz. It shows that a genealogy of contemporary theory needs to look at the question of presentation, which has arguably been a question that has worried philosophy from its very beginning. (shrink)

Every Thing Must Go aruges that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it ...

Sir David Ross was one of the most distinguished and influential Aristotelians of this century; his study has long been established as an authoritative survey ...

At a time when scientific knowledge is systematically whisked out of the domain of education and converted into private capital, the essays in this volume are ...

Illusionism about phenomenal properties has the potential to leave us with all the benefit of taking consciousness seriously and far fewer problems than those accompanying phenomenal realism. The particular problem I explore here is an epistemological puzzle that leaves the phenomenal realist with a dilemma but causes no trouble for the illusionist: how can we account for false beliefs about our own phenomenal properties? If realism is true, facts about our phenomenal properties must hold independent of our beliefs about those (...) properties, so mistaken phenomenal beliefs must always remain an open possibility. But there is no way to identify the phenomenal facts that make these beliefs false other than by mere stipulation. If illusionism is true, then the state of affairs regarding what a subject's experience seems like is just the illusion itself; there are no further facts of the matter about which the subject might have mistaken beliefs, so the problem does not arise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...) virtue? And do epistemic virtues need to be reliable? I will sketch an account on which curiosity is only virtuous when rooted in a non-instrumental appreciation of epistemic goods, before arguing that curiosity can exhibit intellectual virtue irrespective of whether one is reliable in satisfying it. (shrink)

I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...) dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed. (shrink)

Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large-scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that researchers are unable to (...) study live juries. The indirect sources of evidence used by researchers suffer from various problems, the most important of which is dubious levels of ecological validity. Real jury research—studying live jury deliberation—is controversial. However, as I argue, the objections to it are unconvincing. There is in fact a moral imperative to facilitate real jury research. (shrink)

In this essay, I suggest that Spinoza acknowledges a distinction between formal reality that is infinite and timelessly eternal and formal reality that is non-infinite (i. e., finite or indefinite) and non-eternal (i. e., enduring). I also argue that if, in Spinoza’s system, only intelligible causation is genuine causation, then infinite, timelessly eternal formal reality cannot cause non-infinite, non-eternal formal reality. A denial of eternal-durational causation generates a puzzle, however: if no enduring thing – not even the sempiternal, indefinite individual (...) composed of all finite, enduring things – is caused by the infinite, eternal substance, then how can Spinoza consistently hold that the one infinite, eternal substance is the cause of all things and that all things are modes of that substance? At the end of this essay, I sketch how Spinoza could deny eternal-durational causation while still holding that an infinite, eternal God is the cause of all things and that all things are modes. I develop the interpretation more in the companion essay.1 1 In “Spinoza’s Monism II,” in the next issue of this journal. (shrink)

Despite playing an important role in epistemology, philosophy of science, and more recently in moral philosophy and aesthetics, the nature of understanding is still much contested. One attractive framework attempts to reduce understanding to other familiar epistemic states. This paper explores and develops a methodology for testing such reductionist theories before offering a counterexample to a recently defended variant on which understanding reduces to what an agent knows.

An old question in Spinoza scholarship is how finite, non-eternal things transitively caused by other finite, non-eternal things (i. e., the entities described in propositions like E1p28) are caused by the infinite, eternal substance, given that what follows either directly or indirectly from the divine nature is infinite and eternal (E1p21–23). In “Spinoza’s Monism I,” “Spinoza’s Monism I,” in the previous issue of this journal. I pointed out that most commentators answer this question by invoking entities that are indefinite and (...) sempiternal, but argued that perhaps we should not be so quick to assume that in Spinoza’s system, an infinite and eternal substance could cause such indefinite, sempiternal entities. But if such eternal-durational causation is denied, then it seems harder to see how Spinoza’s system could be coherent: if Spinoza holds that the infinite, eternal substance cannot cause anything that is not infinite and not eternal, then how can he also hold that all things are modes immanently caused by substance (E1p15, E1p18, E1p25)? In this essay, I explain how Spinoza’s system could be understood in light of a denial of eternal-durational causation. On the interpretation I offer, God is the cause of all things and all things are modes because the essences of all things follow from the divine nature and all essences enjoy infinite, eternal reality as modes immanently caused by the infinite, eternal substance. The same non-substantial essences can also be conceived as enjoying non-infinite, non-eternal reality, but so conceived, they are enduring, finite (or sempiternal, indefinite) entities that cannot be conceived as modes caused by and inhering in the one infinite, eternal substance. I conclude by pointing out that if we take this interpretive route, we do have to understand Spinoza as committed to acosmism, or a denial of the reality of the world – at least the world of enduring, finite things. (shrink)

My two principal aims in this essay are interconnected. One aim is to provide a new interpretation of the ‘infinite modes’ in Spinoza’s Ethics. I argue that for Spinoza, God, conceived as the one infinite and eternal substance, is not to be understood as causing two kinds of modes, some infinite and eternal and the rest finite and non-eternal. That there cannot be such a bifurcation of divine effects is what I take the ‘infinite mode’ propositions, E1p21–23, to establish; E1p21–23 (...) show that each and every one of the immanent effects of an infinite and eternal God is an infinite and eternal mode. The other aim is to show that these propositions can be understood as part of an extended critical response to Descartes’s infamous doctrine that God creates eternal truths and true and immutable natures. If we have the correct (Spinozan) conceptions of what God is and how God works, we see that an eternal and infinite God can only be understood to cause ‘eternal truths,’ and that these eternal truths are infinite and eternal modes of God. (shrink)