A 21st-century growth in prevalence of extreme right-wing nationalism and social conservatism in Australia, Europe, and America, in certain respects belies the positive impacts of online, new, and alternative forms of global media. Cross-national forms of ‘far-right activism’ are unconfined to their host nations; individuals and organisations campaign on the basis of ethno-cultural separatism, while capitalising on internet-based affordances for communication and ideological cross-fertilisation. Right-wing revolutionary ideas disseminated in this media, to this end, embody politico-cultural aims that can only be (...) understood with attention to their philosophical underpinnings. Drawing on a dataset of articles from the pseudo-news websites, XYZ and The Unshackled, this paper investigates the representation of different rightist political philosophical traditions in contemporary Australia-based far-right media. A critical discourse and content analysis reveal XYZ and TU’s engagement with various traditions, from Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolution, to the European New Right and neo-Nazism. (shrink)

Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called “Big Tech” firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation—or “techlash”—of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. We (...) analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors. However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn “users” and “user engagement” into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics, rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of “techcraft” to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams. (shrink)

From their interpretation of the Australian Citizens’ Jury on genome editing, Scheinerman (2023) concludes that inclusive and diverse deliberative processes of public engagement have salient benefi...

A long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than (...) resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation. (shrink)

This first comprehensive account of the utilitarians' historical thought intellectually resituates their conceptions of philosophy and politics, at a time when the past acquired new significances as both a means and object of study. Drawing on published and unpublished writings - and set against the intellectual backdrops of Scottish philosophical history, German and French historicism, romanticism, positivism, and the rise of social science and scientific history - Callum Barrell recovers the depth with which Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, George Grote, (...) and John Stuart Mill thought about history as a site of philosophy and politics. He argues that the utilitarians, contrary to their reputations as ahistorical and even antihistorical thinkers, developed complex frameworks in which to learn from and negotiate the past, inviting us to rethink the foundations of their ideas, as well as their place in - and relationship to - nineteenth-century philosophy and political thought. (shrink)

Explaining the emergence of the concept in history and how it looks at the past, this title is a guide to the meanings of postmodernism, showing its origins and ...

To balance radical changes in the built environment that accompany urban renewal, many cities deploy historical design elements to provoke a sense of physical and temporal continuity. By examining the theory and practice of nostalgia in renewal projects, I argue that this strategic deployment of historical signifiers is more complex and normatively problematic than it first appears. Analysing the design and construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards through Walter Benjamin’s theories of cultural production and historical succession, I show (...) the problematic political effect of such image-led regeneration projects. The stadium exemplifies a system of urban and historical design and construction that uses material artifice to make totalizing political claims, deploying specific historical signifiers as a means to silence others. Drawing from Benjamin’s materialist historiography, I conclude with a survey of the resources that remain for the practice of an architecture of memory in light of my critique. (shrink)

This paper mobilises the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and enjoyment to better understand how processes of education aimed at extending and defending democratic life might respond to and engage with populist politics. I approach this task by engaging with a particular vector of Mouffe and Laclau’s political philosophy, moving from a critique of liberal democracy’s rationalist pretensions to their insistence that left populism and its passionate construction of a ‘people’ is the central task facing radical politics. This attention to the (...) libidinal basis of political identification locates them in a community of Left Lacanian thinkers who reframe the problems of democratic politics in terms of desire and enjoyment rather than miseducation or its lack. Whilst this position might suggest a binary choice between different analytical frames, I inquire into what insights are generated by theorising left populism as an ‘education of desire’. The paper is organised into four main parts: the opening discussion clarifies my understanding of education by engaging with the literature on educational agonism. The second section lays the groundwork for a critique of the way in which education is fetishized, in different ways, by liberals and radicals as a panacea for populist politics. The third section reframes democratic crisis as an enjoyment problem in order to better grasp the relationship between the liberal democratic disavowal of its own irrationality and the structure of right-wing populist enjoyment. The fourth section applies these insights to develop a critical analysis of what is at stake when we explicitly consider the left populist construction of a ‘people’ as an educational task. I conclude by drawing together and summarising the main features and considerations of left populism understood as an education of desire. (shrink)

The mathematical field of graph theory has recently been used to provide counterexamples to the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. In response to this, it has been argued that appeal to relations between graphs allows the Principle to survive the counterexamples. In this paper, I aim to show why that proposal does not succeed.

Symmetry principles are a central part of contemporary physics, yet there has been surprisingly little metaphysical work done on them. This article develops the Wignerian treatment of symmetries as higher-order laws—metalaws—within a Humean framework of lawhood. Lange has raised two obstacles to Humean metalaws, and the article shows that the account has the resources available to respond to both. It is argued that this framework for Humean metalaws stands as an example of naturalistic metaphysics, able to bring Humeanism into contact (...) with the practice of actual science without giving up on the central denial of necessary connections. (shrink)

I examine the effort that some theorists make to write to, and inspire a new sense of agency in, their readers. I will consider the work of John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, two theorists who attempt to close the gap between political reality and a theoretically informed politics by using their texts to rethink and recreate their reader. By working between a determined past and the possibility of a redeemed future, Dewey and Arendt use their theory to implant a sense (...) that their present readers can become self-aware, free, and potent agents for political change. (shrink)

This book explores the theories of transhumanism and posthumanism, two philosophies that deal with radically changing bodies, minds, and even the nature of humanity itself.

Scientists have used models for hundreds of years as a means of describing phenomena and as a basis for further analogy. In Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science, Daniela Bailer-Jones assembles an original and comprehensive philosophical analysis of how models have been used and interpreted in both historical and contemporary contexts. Bailer-Jones delineates the many forms models can take (ranging from equations to animals; from physical objects to theoretical constructs), and how they are put to use. She examines (...) early mechanical models employed by nineteenth-century physicists such as Kelvin and Maxwell, describes their roots in the mathematical principles of Newton and others, and compares them to contemporary mechanistic approaches. Bailer-Jones then views the use of analogy in the late nineteenth century as a means of understanding models and to link different branches of science. She reveals how analogies can also be models themselves, or can help to create them. The first half of the twentieth century saw little mention of models in the literature of logical empiricism. Focusing primarily on theory, logical empiricists believed that models were of temporary importance, flawed, and awaiting correction. The later contesting of logical empiricism, particularly the hypothetico-deductive account of theories, by philosophers such as Mary Hesse, sparked a renewed interest in the importance of models during the 1950s that continues to this day. Bailer-Jones analyzes subsequent propositions of: models as metaphors; Kuhn's concept of a paradigm; the Semantic View of theories; and the case study approaches of Cartwright and Morrison, among others. She then engages current debates on topics such as phenomena versus data, the distinctions between models and theories, the concepts of representation and realism, and the discerning of falsities in models. (shrink)

Scientistic conceptualisations hold to the positivistic positions that science is limitless in its potential representations of material phenomena and that it is the only sure path to knowledge. In recent popular scientific literature, these presuppositions have been reaffirmed to the detriment of both philosophy and theology. This article argues for the contrary position by a meta-analysis of empirical science from a Thomist perspective. Identifying empirical science as limited in its method and bound to the material sphere of being alone, we (...) posit that rather than standing as the sole path to the knowledge of being, empirical science is constrained at its frontiers. It is subsequently contended that far from empirical science having the explanatory ability to respond to all presenting scientific problems in principle, fundamentals without the grasp of the methodology of empirical science exist. To relate the article’s meta-analysis to scientific praxis, physical cosmology – as the most foundational empirical science – is exemplified in the discussion.Keywords: Philosophy; Religion; Science; Scientism; Thomism; Metaphysics; Epistemology. (shrink)

In a recent paper in JVI, ‘An Anarchist Interpretation of Marx’s “Ability to Needs” Principle,’ Spafford has argued that: (i) the communist and anarchist traditions share an objection to a particular kind of exchange (which he calls quid pro quo exchange); (ii) the anarchist objection to quid pro quo exchange can be understood as opposition to conditional exchange; (iii) consequently, the objection motivates an opposition to conditional exchange as such (i.e. a commitment to unconditional exchange); and (iv) we can construct (...) a normative justification of this opposition by reference to the value of freedom, given that conditional exchange offers diminish the freedom of the recipients of the offers. In this reply piece I argue that (ii) is importantly mistaken, and that consequently (iii) also fails. Although all quid pro quo exchanges are conditional exchanges, the converse does not hold, and we have reason to believe that there will be instances of conditional exchange that are unobjectionable by the lights of the traditional anarchist and communist objection to such exchange. Consequently, an opposition to all conditional exchange rules out too much. However, I will argue that a suitably modified version of (iv) may nevertheless survive the counterexamples that defeat (ii). (shrink)

According to the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, conscious states are just those states that are the object of a suitable higher-order thought to the effect that one is in that state. These higher-order thoughts perform this role by providing subjects with a particular type of _awareness_. However, HOT theorists have tended to offer two alternative formulations of this awareness when stating the basic claims of HOT theory. According to what I call the _state formulation_ of HOT theory, HOTs (...) provide subjects with an awareness of _mental states_, and a mental state is conscious only if the subject is aware of that state. According to what I call the _oneself formulation_ of HOT theory, HOTs provide subjects with an awareness of _themselves as being in a mental state_, and a mental state is conscious only if the subject is aware of themselves as being in that state. In this paper I explore the dialectical significance and legitimacy of HOT theorists’ current practice of employing both formulations. I argue that there is some reason for HOT theorists to adopt the oneself formulation, rather than the state formulation. However, this appears to weaken HOT theory considerably, by abandoning the idea that when our mental states are conscious, we are aware of those states themselves. Against this objection I argue that adopting the oneself formulation does not require abandoning the basic idea lying behind the state formulation and that this is consistent with the reasons for favouring the oneself formulation. (shrink)

African Philosophy and St Thomas Aquinas have both been taught in African universities, but the engagement between the continent’s indigenous philosophical tradition and the Catholic intellectual tradition’s preeminent strand, has not been thorough. Presupposing that plural philosophical traditions contribute to the search to better understand, this research embarks upon a comparative analysis of the perspectives of the African ubuntu philosophy and Thomist philosophical conceptualisations of human becoming and being. Through analysis of dimensions of both traditions, it is contended that human (...) fulness arises through relationality. It is argued that in centring on the interpersonal encounter and the consequent recognition of another’s being through mutual engagement, these philosophical traditions open to each other. Further, both traditions contribute toward the ontology of personhood in ubuntu and the good of mutual indwelling, respectively. (shrink)

Impact sourcing is the practice of employing socio-economically disadvantaged individuals at business process outsourcing centres to reduce poverty and create secure jobs. One of the pioneers of impact sourcing is Sama, a training-data company that focuses on annotating data for artificial intelligence (AI) systems and claims to support an ethical AI supply chain through its business operations. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at three of Sama’s East African delivery centres in Kenya and Uganda and follow-up online interviews, this article interrogates Sama’s (...) claims regarding the benefits of its impact sourcing model. Our analysis reveals alarming accounts of low wages, insecure work, a tightly disciplined labour management process, gender-based exploitation and harassment and a system designed to extract value from low-paid workers to produce profits for investors. We argue that competitive market-based dynamics generate a powerful force that pushes such companies towards limiting the actual social impact of their business model in favour of ensuring higher profit margins. This force can be resisted, but only through countervailing measures such as pressure from organised workers, civil society, or regulation. These findings have broad implications related to working conditions for low-wage data annotators across the sector and cast doubt on the ethical nature of AI products that rely on this form of AI data work. (shrink)

In his 2010 work, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking, argues that ‘… philosophy is dead’. While not a Philosopher, Hawking provides strong argument for his thesis, principally that philosophers have not taken science sufficiently seriously and so Philosophy is no longer relevant to knowledge claims. In this paper, Hawking’s claim is appraised and critiqued, becoming a meta-philosophical discussion. It is argued that Philosophy is dead, in some sense, due to particular philosophers having embarked on an intellectual path no longer in (...) keeping with the ancient definition of Philosophy. Philosophy as the seeking of wisdom necessarily includes the consideration of findings of other intellectual pursuits, including physical and natural science. While Philosophy has justifiably evolved through its long history, is it unrecognisable in the terms by which it historically defined itself? Seeking consistency, Hawking is critiqued for appearing to practise ‘dead’ Philosophy. Indeed, Hawking’s appeal to multiverse theory and his core discussion of the metaphysical problem of being are philosophical. The question of the death of Philosophy has contemporary relevance for the discipline which is particularly under threat for its survival in the academy, oftentimes assumed to be irrelevant. (shrink)

Arguing in support of Aristotle, Aquinas conceptualised the cognitive functioning of the human as exceeding that of other animals. In its base form, the Thomistic position asserts that the intellective functioning of the human animal is superior to the instinctual operation of the non-human animal. For Aquinas, it is the intellect that determines the enactment of the human will. Thus, if a non-human animal is devoid of intellect, no willing of any action is possible. Consequently, an action of a non-human (...) animal which is humanly perceived as immoral, is in fact morally agnostic because the animal lacks the reasoning capacity to judge the potential action's moral status. Given that Aquinas’ argument centres on the role of reason in determinations of moral status, we seek to determine the status theoria of the Thomistic moral theory in light of contemporary studies into animal cognition. The assertion is made that this particular aspect of Aquinas’ moral theory requires rewriting because reason is evident in animal cognition to a greater extent than Aquinas would have been able to appreciate given his contextual limitations. This presence of reason, we argue, ascribes moral status to some non-human animals, analogous to their human counterparts. However, we will also contend that rather than dismissing Aquinas’ reason-founded ethics, value could be found in retaining a rewritten Thomistic theoretical construction which extends Aquinas’ ethic to include animals apart from the human that are bearers of the faculty of reason. (shrink)

As the ideological constructor of the destruction of colonised peoples and knowledge, Western philosophy must bear its burden for complicity. Decoloniality is amid the discourses of critique contra modernity and its denigration of the colonised. In the South African academy, for instance, much support has been validly rendered to decoloniality, consequently those employing “Western” frameworks should be challenged to constant re-evaluation. Here, the virtues and vices of decoloniality will not be considered. Rather a discernment will be undertaken of the “epistemic (...) worth” of conducting – specifically mediaeval and Western – philosophical research amid calls for the decentring of Western epistemological dominance, within the tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the decolonial milieu. The argument is proffered – from multifold perspectives – that Aquinas, as both pre-modern and pre-colonial, does have relevance to the decolonial academic climate. The case is defended that Arabic philosophers importantly influenced Aquinas’ work, thus, demonstrating his openness to non-Western thought. Furthermore, from an epistemological perspective, it is contended that Aquinas’ placing of the subject at the focal point of adequations to truth by credencing the situatedness of the perceiver, deconstructs modern objectivity, which in itself has caused considerable damage to non-Western epistemologies. Aquinas’ epistemic relevance in this context, it is argued, may contribute to a median between demonstrable science and the multi-layered context of the epistemic subject. (shrink)

In many jurisdictions in the United States and elsewhere, the law governing deadly force by police and civilians contains a notable asymmetry. Often civilians but not police are bound by the imminence requirement—that is, a necessary condition for justifying deadly force is reasonable belief that oneself or another innocent person faces imminent threat of grave harm. In U.S. law enforcement, however, there has been some shift toward the imminence requirement, most evident in the use-of-force policy adopted by the Department of (...) Justice in 2022. This article defends that shift and argues that the ethical case for the imminence requirement in policing is stronger than Shannon Brandt Ford suggests in a recent article. Though the imminence requirement’s impacts on policing and public safety require ongoing study, the principle of equality before the law and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing both provide moral grounds for this requirement, especially given the lack of evidence that the status quo helps protect life. (shrink)

Natural and supernatural explanations are used to interpret the same events in a number of predictable and universal ways. Yet little is known about how variation in diverse cultural ecologies influences how people integrate natural and supernatural explanations. Here, we examine explanatory coexistence in three existentially arousing domains of human thought: illness, death, and human origins using qualitative data from interviews conducted in Tanna, Vanuatu. Vanuatu, a Melanesian archipelago, provides a cultural context ideal for examining variation in explanatory coexistence due (...) to the lack of industrialization and the relatively recent introduction of Christianity and Western education. We argue for the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies from cognitive science and anthropology to inform research on explanatory coexistence. (shrink)

In this book , Lorraine Besser-Jones develops a eudaimonistic virtue ethics based on a psychological account of human nature. While her project maintains the fundamental features of the eudaimonistic virtue ethical framework—virtue, character, and well-being—she constructs these concepts from an empirical basis, drawing support from the psychological fields of self-determination and self-regulation theory. Besser-Jones’s resulting account of "eudaimonic ethics" presents a compelling normative theory and offers insight into what is involved in being a virtuous person and "acting well." (...) This original contribution to contemporary ethics and moral psychology puts forward a provocative hypothesis of what an empirically-based moral theory would look like. (shrink)

Many strategies have been proposed to address the supply of bespoke essays and other assignments by companies often described as ‘Essay Mills’ with the act of supply and use being invariably described as ‘contract cheating’. These proposals increasingly refer to the law as a solution in common with other action. In this article, the lead author revisits work undertaken in 2016 as a result of recent legal and extra-legal developments to assess whether the UK Fraud Act (2006) might now be (...) used to tackle some of the activities of the companies involved, by comparing their common practises, and their Terms and Conditions, with the Act. It was previously found that all sites have disclaimers regarding the use of their products but there were some obvious contradictions in the activities of the sites which undermined those disclaimers, for example plagiarism-free guarantees for the work. In this article, we ask and consider the question whether this is still the case having regard to the impact of a change in the law by the UK supreme court and recent action of the UK Advertising Standards Authority. We also consider whether a call for a new offence to be created which specifically targets the undesirable behaviours of these companies is still justified. (shrink)

As much a portrait of his time as a biography of the man, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion returns the author of Das Kapital to his nineteenth-century world, before twentieth-century inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. Gareth Stedman Jones depicts an era dominated by extraordinary challenges and new notions about God, human capacities, empires, and political systems—and, above all, the shape of the future. In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a Europe-wide argument began about (...) the industrial transformation of England, the Revolution in France, and the hopes and fears generated by these occurrences. Would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the revolutionary events and ideas that had brought this world into being, or would its inheritors be those who feared and loathed it? Stedman Jones gives weight not only to Marx’s views but to the views of those with whom he contended. He shows that Marx was as buffeted as anyone else living through a period that both confirmed and confounded his interpretations—and that ultimately left him with terrible intimations of failure. Karl Marx allows the reader to understand Marx’s milieu and development, and makes sense of the devastating impact of new ways of seeing the world conjured up by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, and others. We come to understand how Marx transformed and adapted their philosophies into ideas that would have—through twists and turns inconceivable to him—an overwhelming impact across the globe in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Depuis 2020, le monde a connu une situation sanitaire exceptionnelle à la suite de la pandémie de Covid-19, faisant face à une incertitude dans le monde médical clinique, de la recherche et dans l’ensemble des domaines connexes en santé publique. Le caractère imprévisible et l’absence de données fiables en lien avec ce virus ont fait émerger une quantité d’enjeux éthiques concrets, cela a donc révélé un domaine particulier, la bioéthique, et plus particulièrement une profession, les bioéthiciens. Les « bioéthiciens » (...) se sont fait connaître du grand public en se dressant parfois comme des garde-fous contre des dérives sanitaires, à d’autres moments comme des lanceurs d’alertes face à des injustices naissantes, ou comme critiques, polémistes et parfois même militants dans les médias ou en tant qu’acteurs de première ligne dans les systèmes politico-sanitaires. Ces divers rôles et pratiques illustrent bien la diversité et l’hétérogénéité du domaine de la bioéthique. Toutefois, l’absence de professionnalisation traditionnelle et formelle de la bioéthique complexifie la compréhension de ce champ disciplinaire. Même en Amérique du Nord, où la pratique de la bioéthique est professionnalisée, il ne s’agit toujours pas d’une profession officiellement reconnue et le terme « bioéthicien » lui-même peut être controversé. La forte présence de cette profession durant la pandémie de Covid-19 a révélé l’importance de décrire ce qu’est un bioéthicien, les fonctions qu’il occupe et en quoi consistent ses interventions. Nous apportons cette clarification nécessaire en expliquant la nature de la bioéthique contemporaine dans toute sa diversité. Comme nous l’a démontré la pandémie de Covid-19, les bioéthiciens représentant un soutien et un guide indispensable de nos jours menés par leur esprit critique et leur réflexivité permanente. (shrink)

Nishida Kitaro, originator of the Kyoto School and 'father of Japanese Philosophy' is usually viewed as an essentially apolitical thinker who underwent a 'turn' in the mid-1930s, becoming an ideologue of Japanese imperialism. Political Philosophy in Japan challenges the view that a neat distinction can be drawn between Nishida's apolitical 'pre-turn' writings and the apparently ideological tracts he produced during the war years. In the context of Japanese intellectual traditions, this book suggests that Nishida was a political thinker form the (...) very beginning of his career, and consequently, his later political works cannot be dismissed as peripheral to his philosophical project. Counter-intuitively however, Christopher Goto-Jones argues that a consistently political reading of his philosophy reveals a dissenting standpoint even during the height of the Pacific War. This book argues that the prevailing postwar tendency to dismiss interwar and wartime Japanese culture as fascist or ultra nationalist en total neglects a lively political discourse, which contained some serous and profound political insight and even dissent. By suggesting that Nishida tetsugaku was a voice of dissent during Japan's Great East Asia War, Goto-Jones presents a case for the rehabilitation of Nishida as a political thinker, and as an example of a Japanese resistance, able to make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates about international political, globalization , and inter-cultural relations. Offering a unique and potentially controversial view of the subject of Nishida and the Kyoto School, The Political Philosophy of Japan will be of huge interest to anyone studying Japanese History, Political Philosophy and comparative philosophy alike. (shrink)

We examine the responses of South African multinational enterprises to corruption in African markets in the context of institutional voids. Corruption is a source of uncertainty and additional transactional costs for MNEs and it necessitates a strategic response. The research employs a qualitative study of a sample of MNEs with experience in internationalising into Africa. The results indicate that corruption in African markets is pervasive and closely associated with the institutional voids in these countries. MNEs see themselves as ‘institution takers’ (...) responding to countries’ institutional makeup at the organisational and individual level but fail to fully appreciate their impact on institutions both positively and negatively. Rather MNEs focus on strategic responses at the organisational level to address corruption operationally in the host country. We add to the existing literature by providing a dynamic framework of the complex webs of association between institutions, MNEs and corruption in conditions of economic underdevelopment. The research suggests that MNEs do not need to get caught in a vicious cycle whereby they perpetuate corruption in conditions of underdevelopment and institutional voids but instead can contribute towards a virtuous cycle through which they institutionalise ethical foundations. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is on the move both in Anglo-American philosophy and in the rest of the world. This volume uniquely emphasizes non-Western varieties of virtue ethics at the same time that it includes work in the many different fields or areas of philosophy where virtue ethics has recently spread its wings. Just as significantly, several chapters make comparisons between virtue ethics and other ways of approaching ethics or political philosophy or show how virtue ethics can be applied to "real world" (...) problems. (shrink)

Call a bit of scientific discourse a description of a missing system when (i) it has the surface appearance of an accurate description of an actual, concrete system (or kind of system) from the domain of inquiry, but (ii) there are no actual, concrete systems in the world around us fitting the description it contains, and (iii) that fact is recognised from the outset by competent practitioners of the scientific discipline in question. Scientific textbooks, classroom lectures, and journal articles abound (...) with such passages; and there is a widespread practice of talking and thinking as though there are systems which fit the descriptions they contain perfectly, despite the recognition that no actual, concrete systems do so—call this the face value practice. There are, furthermore, many instances in which philosophers engage in the face value practice whilst offering answers to epistemological and methodological questions about the sciences. Three questions, then: (1) How should we interpret descriptions of missing systems? (2) How should we make sense of the face value practice? (3) Is there a set of plausible answers to (1) and (2) which legitimates reliance on the face value practice in our philosophical work, and can support the weight of the accounts which are entangled with that practice? In this paper I address these questions by considering three answers to the first: that descriptions of missing systems are straightforward descriptions of abstract objects, that they are indirect descriptions of “property-containing” abstracta, and that they are (in a different way) indirect descriptions of mathematical structures. All three proposals are present in the literature, but I find them wanting. The result is to highlight the importance of developing a satisfactory understanding of descriptions of missing systems and the face value practice, to put pressure on philosophical accounts which rely on the practice, and to help us assess the viability of certain approaches to thinking about models, theory structure, and scientific representation. (shrink)

This study presents scientific theories about the female body in Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It demonstrates the influence of cultural preconceptions on such theories, and of scientific theories on cultural attitudes.

In this new and original book, Claire Armon-Jones examines the concept of affect and various philosophical positions which attempt to define and characterize it: the standard view, the neo-cognitivist view, and the objectual thesis. She contends that these views radically distort our understanding of affect by disregarding modes of affect which fail to conform to the accounts they each employ. Against the standard and neo-cognitivist views she argues that the notions they use to characterize affect are neither necessary nor (...) sufficient; and against the objectual thesis she further argues that affective states exhibit degrees of independence from the concept of an object. She develops a new theory of the varieties of affect that explains their cognitive nature, their felt aspect, their special logic and the relationship between their objectless and object-directed forms. Armon-Jones concludes by suggesting that her arguments call into question certain assumptions about the rationality and moral status of affect and require a revision of the conception of the good in affect. (shrink)

Scientific models represent aspects of the empirical world. I explore to what extent this representational relationship, given the specific properties of models, can be analysed in terms of propositions to which truth or falsity can be attributed. For example, models frequently entail false propositions despite the fact that they are intended to say something "truthful" about phenomena. I argue that the representational relationship is constituted by model users "agreeing" on the function of a model, on the fit with data and (...) on the aspects of a phenomenon that are modelled. Model users weigh the propositions entailed by a model and from this decide which of these propositions are crucial to the acceptance and continued use of the model. Thus, models represent phenomena when certain propositions they entail are true, but this alone does not exhaust the representational relationship. Therefore, the constraints that produce the choice of the relevant propositions in a model must also be examined and their analysis contributes to understanding the relationship between models and phenomena. (shrink)

What does it mean to defend moral cosmopolitanism in terms of human rights? I outline ‘human rights cosmopolitanism’, explain the role of equality in giving content to this conception, and defend the liberal view of human rights against the restricted view by considering – and responding to – several arguments for remaining neutral between a range of cultural and ideological perspectives on the demands of social justice and political legitimacy. I defend the liberal view that a conception of human rights (...) should not remain neutral on controversial questions of justice and legitimacy. (shrink)

Julia Annas argues that Aristotle's understanding of the phenomenological experience of the virtuous agent corresponds to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the ?flow,? which is a form of intrinsic motivation. In this paper, I explore whether or not Annas? understanding of virtuous agency is a plausible one. After a thorough analysis of psychological accounts of intrinsic and extrinsic states of motivation, I argue that despite the attractiveness of Annas? understanding of virtuous agency, it is subject to a serious problem: all (...) virtuous activities are not ones that we take pleasure in independently of their connection to ?virtue.? Moreover, somewhat sadly, we have no compelling reason to think that they can become so. Our psychology is not constituted to find the exercise of virtue, in all of its extensions, interesting and enjoyable, apart from its connection to virtue. (shrink)

Hume’s theory of justice, intricately linked to his account of moral development, is at once simplistic and mysterious, combining familiar conventionalistelements with perplexing, complicated elements of his rich moral psychology. These dimensions of his theory make interpreting it no easy task, although many have tried. Emerging from these many different attempts is a picture of Hume as defending an account of justice according to which justice consists of expedient rules designed to advance one’s self-interest. The mistake of this view, I (...) argue, lies in its narrow focus on the material rather than psychological effects of the conventions of justice. My goal here is to isolate the psychological effects of the rules of justice by analyzing the psychological transformation of the parties who morally commit to justice. (shrink)

'Knowledge Capitalism' reveals how the emerging knowledge-based economy is redefining firms, empowering individuals and reshaping learning and work. It provides a practical tool-set for business managers to interpret and manage change.