In British constitutional law, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty maintains that Parliament has unlimited legislative authority. Critics have recently challenged this doctrine, on historical and philosophical grounds. This book describes its historical origins and development.

The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty has long been regarded as the most fundamental element of the British Constitution. It holds that Parliament has unlimited legislative authority, and that the courts have no authority to judge statutes invalid. This doctrine has now been criticized on historical and philosophical grounds and critics claim that it is a relatively recent invention of academic lawyers that superseded an earlier tradition in which Parliament's authority was limited to common law. The critics also argue that it (...) is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between statutory and common law, and is morally indefensible. The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy responds to these criticisms. It first defines and clarifies the concept of legislative sovereignty and then describes the historical origins and the development of the doctrine from the thirteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Professor Goldsworthy goes on to identify many different reasons why persuaded statesmen, lawyers, and political theorists have endorsed the doctrine. He discusses the ideas of a large number of legal and political thinkers, including Fortescue, St German, Hooker, Coke, Bacon, Parker, Milton, Hobbes, Hale, Locke, Bolingbroke, Blackstone, and Burke. He shows that judges in Great Britain have never had authority to invalidate statutes, and that the doctrine is much older than is generally realized. The book concludes by dealing with philosophical criticisms of the doctrine. Combining the insights of earlier thinkers with those of contemporary legal philosophers, it demonstrates that these criticisms are based on a defective understanding of the nature and foundations of law, and of the relationship between legislative authority and the common law. It argues that the doctrine is morally defensible, and refutes the thesis that the judges have authority to modify or reject it. (shrink)

What should and what should not to be counted as a human right? What does it mean to identify a right as a human right? And what are the most effective and legitimate means of promoting human rights? This book addresses these questions and the complex relationship between the answers to them.

In this book, a distinguished international group of legal theorists re-examine legal positivism as a prescriptive political theory and consider its implications for the constitutionally defined roles of legislatures and courts. The issues are illustrated with recent developments in Australian constitutional law.

In his recent book Interpretation and Legal Theory , Andrei Marmor makes a number of claims about meaning and interpretation, both in general and in law, which I will argue are mistaken. Actually, there is some confusion in his book between what I take to be his “official” view of the nature of meaning and interpretation, and a very different view which keeps surfacing despite his official rejection of it. I will argue that this alternative, rejected view, when properly developed, (...) is more plausible than his official view, and that the difference between them is of considerable practical consequence for legal interpretation. What is at stake is the role of legislative intention. The alternative view denies Marmor's claim that the meaning of a statute is conceptually independent of the intention or purpose which the legislature had in enacting it. It should be said at the outset that I will focus on just three of the eight chapters in Marmor's book, which contains many virtues that are untouched by my critique. (shrink)

Something can be said to be good for a particular person, whether or not it is good for anyone else, let alone good ‘overall’ or ‘good simpliciter ’. Sometimes we speak of ‘John's good’ as well as of things that are ‘good for John’. What is ‘good for John’ is whatever enhances his ‘good’ or, to use an apparently synonymous term, his ‘well-being’. But what is a person's well-being: in what does it consist?

In "Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics", David Brink defendsexternalist moral realism against Mackie's sceptical arguments, whichpresuppose some kind of internalism. But Brink confuses the issues by failing to distinguish different kinds of internalism. What he calls conceptual internalism may be false, but Mackie can retreat to sociological internalism, which holds that most people believe moral requirements to be capable of motivating action regardless of pre-existing desires. Brink does not challenge that thesis, which isall that Mackie's sceptical arguments necessarily (...) presuppose. (shrink)

Constitutional interpretation is problematic because it can be difficult to distinguish legitimate interpretation from illegitimate change. The distinction depends largely on what a constitution is. A constitution, like any other law, necessarily has a meaning, which pre-exists judicial interpretation: it is not a set of meaningless marks on paper. Any plausible constitutional theory must offer an account of the nature of that meaning. In doing so, it must address two main questions. The first is whether the meaning of the constitution (...) is given solely by its words, or also by additional evidence of underlying intentions, purposes or values. The second question is whether, in either case, its meaning is determined by the original meanings, intentions, purposes or values of the founding generation, or by contemporary meanings, intentions, purposes or values. This question divides so-called 'originalists' from 'non-originalists'. This article discusses all these alternatives, and the main arguments for and against them. It is subtitled 'Originalism' because it defends a moderate version of that position; however, it is argued that this is equivalent to a moderate version of non-originalism. (shrink)

This review article examines Richard Ekins’ attempt to defend the concept of legislative intention from influential criticism, and to demonstrate its indispensable and central role in statutory interpretation. He rejects accounts of legislative intention in terms of the aggregation of the intentions of individual legislators, and instead, draws on recent philosophical work on the nature of group agency to propose a unitary model, in which the relevant intention is that of the legislature itself, although it is supported by the ‘interlocking’ (...) of the intentions of all its members. The legislature has two relevant intentions: a secondary or standing intention to operate by way of agreed procedures to develop and enact particular proposals for legislation to enhance the welfare of the community; and primary intentions that consist of the content of those proposals once the legislature has enacted them. Ekins restricts the evidence that is relevant and admissible in order to determine the content of such proposals; because they must be ‘open’ to all legislators, and transparent to the community, the evidence must be publicly available. This article summarizes the main theses of the book, and subjects them to critical examination. It concludes that the book adds considerable depth, rigour and theoretical insight to our understanding of these issues. But it also suggests that his argument is vulnerable to criticism at a few points, at least one of which is crucial. The argument needs a better account of what it is that constitutes the content of particular proposals when they are put to the legislature for enactment. (shrink)

The lesson is that while externalists avoid devastating objections to internalist moral realism, they thereby sacrifice most of thepractical significance of moral realism as an alternative to noncognitivism. They defend the objectivity of moral beliefs, but are forced to concede that the practical relevance and appeal of those beliefs depends on subjective desires. It is because they correctly reject internalism that they succumb to the non-cognitivists'tu quoque.

How can one examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, and preferences without falling into the self‐refuting determinism that has so often characterized the most systematic theory of preferences, Marxism? Cultural Theory's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived, competing “ways of life"— individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and withdrawal from social life—that are intended to apply to all forms of culture and, therefore, to provide a universal framework for explaining people's preferential biases. Richard Ellis's defense of Cultural Theory, however, (...) does not adequately address the concerns expressed in my critique of it. Ellis fails to instance a single case of a premodern culture containing the five ways of life; he does not show that exclusivist premodern versions of “individualism” and “egalitarianism” are more than superficially comparable to the inclusive modern variants of these alleged universals; and he adds new evidence to support my claim that in modern societies, people's preferences are largely unlinked to the particular social relations identified by Cultural Theory. While Ellis overtly denies that Cultural Theory is deterministic, his search for links between preferences and social relations shows that this denial cannot be sustained.Cultural Theory's reductionism stems from its neglect of historically contingent cultural traditions that thwart a priori attempts to predict culture. This ahistori‐cism transforms a myopic view of American politics as a battle of egalitarianism against individualism into a timeless truth, providing ideological self‐affirmation for “individualists” but diminishing the prospects for being able to explain or criticize individualism—or any other political preference. (shrink)

Against my claim that free‐market environmentalism cannot solve major environmental problems, my critics deny that such problems exist. Against my contention that FME depends on the democratic policymaking it decries, they retreat from FME to libertarian environmentalism. Against my argument that LE is incoherent, they resort to anti‐intellectualism. These responses stem from demonstrable precommitments to libertarian ideology, suggesting that the debate over FME and LE has profound implications, not only for their practitioners, but for all libertarians and many free‐market social (...) scientists. (shrink)

Proper functionalism claims that a belief has epistemic warrant only if it’s formed according to the subject’s truth-aimed cognitive design plan. The most popular putative counter-examples to proper functionalism all involve agents who form beliefs in seemingly warrant-enabling ways that don’t appear to proceed according to any sort of design. The Swampman case is arguably the most famous scenario of this sort. However, some proper functionalists accept that subjects like Swampman have warrant, opting instead to adopt a non-standard account of (...) design. But critics of proper functionalism hold that this strategy comes at a high cost: the design-plan condition now seems explanatorily superfluous. James Taylor construes cases like Swampman as posing a dilemma for the proper functionalist: either deny warrant in these cases and concede that proper functionalism doesn’t capture our intuitions, or affirm warrant and undermine the explanatory power of the design-plan condition. Proper functionalists have replied to both horns of this dilemma. Recently, Kenny Boyce and Andrew Moon have argued that warrant-affirming intuitions on cases like Swampman are motivated by a principle that has a clear counter-example. Also, Alvin Plantinga presents a set of cases that supposedly cause problems for any analysis of warrant that lacks a design-plan condition. In this essay, I present a counter-argument to Boyce and Moon’s argument, and show that a more robust reliability condition can accommodate Plantinga’s problem cases. I conclude that we’re left with no good reason to doubt that cases like Swampman raise a troubling dilemma for the proper functionalist. (shrink)

What might be thought of as religious longings, he argues, are crucial aspects of enchanting secularity when developed through encounters with these works of art.

Several philosophers have embraced the view that high-level events—events like Zimbabwe's monetary policy and its hyper-inflation—are causally related if their corresponding low-level, fundamental physical events are causally related. I dub the view which denies this without denying that high-level events are ever causally related causal emergentism. Several extant philosophical theories of causality entail causal emergentism, while others are inconsistent with the thesis. I illustrate this with David Lewis's two theories of causation, one of which entails causal emergentism, the other of (...) which entails its negation. I then argue for causal emergentism on the grounds that it provides the only adequate means of squaring the apparent plenitude of causal relations between low-level events with the apparent scarcity of causal relations between high-level events. This tension between the apparent abundance of low-level causation and the apparent scarcity of high-level causation has been noted before. However, it has been thought that various theses about the semantics or the pragmatics of causal claims could be used to ameliorate the tension without going in for causal emergentism. I argue that none of the suggested semantic or pragmatic strategies meet with success, and recommend emergentist theories of causality in their stead. As Lewis's 1973 account illustrates, causal emergentism is consistent with the thesis that all facts reduce to microphysical facts. (shrink)

Most contemporary political philosophers deny that justice requires giving people what they deserve. According to a familiar anti-desert argument, the influence of genes and environment on people's actions and traits undermines all desert-claims. According to a less familiar – but more plausible – argument, the influence of genes and environment on people's actions and traits undermines some desert-claims (or all desert-claims to an extent). But, it says, we do not know which ones (or to what extent). This article examines this (...) ‘epistemological’ argument against desert. It gives reason to believe that it fails, emphasizing the importance of justice relative to efficiency and attempting to construct a practical way of measuring desert. (shrink)

One of the main arguments against interventionist views of special divine action is that God would not violate his own laws. But if intervention entails the breaking of natural law, what precisely is being broken? While the nature of the laws of nature has been widely explored by philosophers of science, important distinctions are often ignored in the science and religion literature. In this paper, I consider the three main approaches to laws: Humean anti-realism, supervenience on more fundamental aspects of (...) metaphysics, and nomological realism. The first denies that there is any metaphysical reality behind laws or causation. The second holds that laws supervene on capacities, dispositions, or counterfactuals. The third takes laws to be irreducible aspects of reality. The mechanics of special divine action and worries about intervention vary depending on which view of law one holds. In the end, I argue that early modern natural philosophers, who first introduced law-language for nature, largely had it right. Laws are not created entities or powers that act as intermediaries between God and nature; they are best understood as expressions of God’s will for nature. The outstanding question is whether such a view inevitably lands in occasionalism. (shrink)

Jeffrey conditioning tells an agent how to update her priors so as to grant a given probability to a particular event. Weighted averaging tells an agent how to update her priors on the basis of testimonial evidence, by changing to a weighted arithmetic mean of her priors and another agent’s priors. We show that, in their respective settings, these two seemingly so different updating rules are axiomatized by essentially the same invariance condition. As a by-product, this sheds new light (...) on the question how weighted averaging should be extended to deal with cases when the other agent reveals only parts of her probability distribution. The combination of weighted averaging and Jeffrey conditioning is a comprehensive updating rule to deal with such cases, which is again axiomatized by invariance under embedding. We conclude that, even though one may dislike Jeffrey conditioning or weighted averaging, the two make a natural pair when a policy for partial testimonial evidence is needed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of TestimonyGiorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of MetaphysicsJeffrey S. Librett (bio)By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as (...) its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting.—Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”Can there be a discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits?—Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language”I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer.—Adolf Hitler, speech before theReichstag, April 26, 1942From his early works on, Giorgio Agamben has opposed the thought of no contemporary philosopher more consistently and programmatically than that of Jacques Derrida, whose questioning of phonocentric metaphysics Agamben has tried to replace by a characterization of metaphysics as (what I am calling here) graphocentric. To go back behind the replacement of the voice by the letter is for Agamben to recover the event of language itself, the taking-place of language as Being.1 In his conceptualization of the project for such a recovery, as we shall see, Agamben’s commitment to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined by his investment in the Christian God as logos.This philosophical program in Agamben’s early essays guides his later work on the homo sacer-sovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it prompts him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness of the homo sacer, effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly theopolitical problem, while placing the specifically Christian background [End Page 11] of his antinomianism in a misleadingly secular, rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically, in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction Agamben must reject Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice—along with the entire modern anthropological reading of the sacred—out of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls the homo sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer..Second, Agamben’s philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi death camps as an extreme example of the sovereign-homo sacer relation by making it impossible for him to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the formation of National Socialist ideology. For Agamben’s philosophical orientation requires or presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, first of all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic dimension of Christian antinomianism—the tendency of such antinomianism to make Judaism responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us all. Further, as a consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how important the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that Agamben’s animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacrificial dimensions of the Holocaust—he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimension—because this animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its racialized National Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian program would become unsettled by his recognition of its important overlap with the ideological bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot ultimately acknowledge the Christian and sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust.Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitz—his main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the significance of the Nazi death camps—Agamben positions “testimony” as the exemplary instance of the speaking of speech, the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry becomes here the revelation of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly, Agamben ends up participating in... (shrink)

W. D. Ross thinks it is good, other things equal, that people get what they deserve. But he denies that "the principle of punishing the vicious, for the sake of doing so, is that on which the state should proceed in its bestowal of punishments." Ross offers two main arguments for this denial: what I call the "scope argument" and the "state's purpose argument." I argue that both fail. In doing so, I illuminate Ross's distinctive views about desert and the (...) state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy by Donovan Miyasaki, and: Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left by Donovan MiyasakiJeffrey ChurchDonovan Miyasaki, Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 292 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-11358-1. Cloth, $54.99.Donovan Miyasaki, Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 330 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-12227-9. Cloth, $54.99.Without a doubt, Nietzsche's political philosophy is one of (...) the most elusive and ambiguous features of his corpus. How else can we explain the dizzying, even contradictory, variety of interpretations of Nietzsche's politics? Some read him as anti-political or a liberal skeptical of state power. For others, he is an aristocratic radical, obsessed with using state power to entrench a new class of Übermenschen. For still others, his thought is most compatible with democracy, as his defenses of perspectivism and agonism are best realized within a democratic political system. Finally, some other scholars throw up their hands and say that Nietzsche's political thought is incoherent.In this two-volume work, Donovan Miyasaki enters this fray with a distinctive defense of the democratic Nietzsche. Two features distinguish his view from others. First, it provides a novel grounding of Nietzschean democracy—what Miyasaki calls Nietzsche's "metapolitics." This grounding is examined in the first volume, Nietzsche's Immoralism (hereafter NI). Second, it offers the most radical political vision of a left Nietzschean form of Nietzschean socialism. For Miyasaki, socialism follows from Nietzsche's fundamental commitments, rather than the aristocratic radicalism that Miyasaki sees Nietzsche inferring—wrongly—from his own commitments. [End Page 97] This extrapolation from Nietzsche's "metapolitics" is undertaken in the second volume, Politics after Morality (hereafter PM). I discuss each of these contributions in turn. In general, I found Miyasaki's work to be clear, perceptive, and bold in their interpretations. That said, with a book that critiques so much of the Nietzsche scholarship and offers such a radical take on Nietzsche's politics, I have some potential objections to raise.Nietzsche's MetapoliticsOther interpreters of a left Nietzsche ground their reading on what they take to be Nietzsche's radical epistemological views: either his perspectivism or his anti-essentialism. This was a popular approach for the postmodern and agonistic readings. By contrast, Miyasaki grounds Nietzschean democracy in a completely different way, on his metaphysics, particularly his determinism and "hard incompatibilism" (NI 25). On Miyasaki's view, Nietzsche denies that freedom and determinism are compatible and hence also that any kind of moral responsibility or moral agency is possible. This is the meaning of Nietzsche's "immoralism." For Miyasaki, Nietzsche's alternative ideal is to engender a particular feeling, namely, the love of this determinism or amor fati.This thesis of hard incompatibilism leads Miyasaki to some sweeping critiques of scholarship on Nietzsche's ethics. Against the many recent interpreters who develop a Nietzschean view of freedom, Miyasaki argues that freedom is impossible in a deterministic world. Against the perfectionist and constitutivist interpreters of Nietzsche's ethics, Miyasaki argues that ethics requires the freedom to improve or fail, and such freedom is impossible. At the same time, Miyasaki admits that Nietzsche at times appeals to and even defends freedom. Yet he explains that what Nietzsche is after in these passages is not freedom, but only the "feeling" of freedom (NI 49). Miyasaki is driven to some strained interpretive moves, such as when he argues that higher individuals' feeling of freedom is enhanced precisely to the degree to which they have abandoned the "illusion of freedom" (NI 49). How can I have the feeling of something I have come to see as an illusion?It is true that Nietzsche critiques the traditional metaphysical notion of the freedom of the will on the basis of his naturalism and determinism. Yet in recent years, scholars have argued that Nietzsche defends a novel conception of freedom that is compatible with determinism, akin to what we find in Spinoza. On this view, freedom is defined in terms of agency rather [End Page 98] than a power or faculty of choice. A free agent is... (shrink)

Why do some physicians continue to treat patients who are clearly dying or persistently unconscious, while others consider medical intervention to be futile past a certain point? No doubt, medical decisions vary in part because clinical information is often ambiguous in individual cases and because it may support more than one reasonable interpretation of a patient's chances for survival or improvement if a particular treatment is administered. Also, cases vary considerably to the extent that a patient's or a family member's (...) preferences for treatment are communicated, understood, and implemented. But, beyond these contingencies, patients at the end of life may receive more, less, or different treatment because physicians themselves are social actors, individuals who bring to bear on their clinical decisions a variety of personal attitudes, values, concerns, and interests. Legal defensiveness, religious vitalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, and other traits may influence physicians’ behavior, but each may be concealed under the rubric of what is “medically indicated” or “medically appropriate.”. (shrink)

Why do some physicians continue to treat patients who are clearly dying or persistently unconscious, while others consider medical intervention to be futile past a certain point? No doubt, medical decisions vary in part because clinical information is often ambiguous in individual cases and because it may support more than one reasonable interpretation of a patient's chances for survival or improvement if a particular treatment is administered. Also, cases vary considerably to the extent that a patient's or a family member's (...) preferences for treatment are communicated, understood, and implemented. But, beyond these contingencies, patients at the end of life may receive more, less, or different treatment because physicians themselves are social actors, individuals who bring to bear on their clinical decisions a variety of personal attitudes, values, concerns, and interests. Legal defensiveness, religious vitalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, and other traits may influence physicians’ behavior, but each may be concealed under the rubric of what is “medically indicated” or “medically appropriate.”. (shrink)

The view that justice requires giving people what they deserve is both ancient and plausible. Yet many contemporary political philosophers, including John Rawls and Robert Nozick, have put forward distributive theories that give no place to desert. In this dissertation, I give reason to believe that the contemporary rejection of desert is mistaken, and that desert should be taken seriously by political philosophers. ;This project is incomplete in the sense that I do not say how seriously desert should be taken---how (...) important it is compared to other distributive ideals . This is an important task, but I do not have the space for it. Hence, while my dissertation is an important first step in restoring desert to a place of significance in theories of distributive justice, it is not the last word. ;In chapter 1, I consider different views about what it means to be deserving, and about the necessary and sufficient conditions for desert. I do not try to solve these debates, but rather stipulate the conception of desert I am interested in. In chapter 2, I offer arguments for its use as a distributive criterion. ;In chapter 3, I consider the "metaphysical argument" against desert. Deriving from naturalistic worries about the robustness of human agency, this argument denies that people are capable of the kind of responsibility required for desert. I distinguish three versions of it, and argue that all fail. The "epistemological argument," examined in chapter 4, doubts that we can know what people deserve. In response, I suggest a way of making distribution according to desert practicable. ;I consider in chapter 5 the asymmetry of desert: the fact that desert plays an insignificant role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice, but a central role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice. I give good reason to believe the asymmetry cannot be justified, considering five potential justifications of it, and arguing that none is successful. I conclude the dissertation by summarizing what I have done, then mapping out directions for future research. (shrink)

The practical superiority of markets over governments has become readily apparent. Only the most dogmatic of state apologists continue to deny this obvious fact—at least with respect to the production of many goods and services. Free-market economists and libertarians go much further, of course. They affirm the market’s superiority in nearly all realms. Yet only a handful of anarchocapitalists, most notably Murray Rothbard, have dared claim that a free market could also do a better job of providing protection from foreign (...) states.1 National defense is generally considered the most essential of all government services. This widely conceded exception to the efficacy of markets seems to have irrefutable empirical confirmation. If private defense is better than government defense, why has government kept winning over the centuries? Indeed, the state’s military prowess has more than seemingly precluded the modern emergence of any anarchocapitalist society. At one time, as far as we know, all humankind lived in stateless bands of hunter-gatherers and had done so since the emergence of modern man some fifty thousand years ago. But beginning around 11,000 B.C., a gradual transition to.. (shrink)

Why do some physicians continue to treat patients who are clearly dying or persistently unconscious, while others consider medical intervention to be futile past a certain point? No doubt, medical decisions vary in part because clinical information is often ambiguous in individual cases and because it may support more than one reasonable interpretation of a patient's chances for survival or improvement if a particular treatment is administered. Also, cases vary considerably to the extent that a patient's or a family member's (...) preferences for treatment are communicated, understood, and implemented. But, beyond these contingencies, patients at the end of life may receive more, less, or different treatment because physicians themselves are social actors, individuals who bring to bear on their clinical decisions a variety of personal attitudes, values, concerns, and interests. Legal defensiveness, religious vitalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, and other traits may influence physicians’ behavior, but each may be concealed under the rubric of what is “medically indicated” or “medically appropriate.”. (shrink)

Critics have recently argued that reliabilists face trade-off problems, forcing them to condone intuitively unjustified beliefs when they generate lots of true belief further downstream. What these critics overlook is that reliabilism entails that there areside-constraintson belief-formation, on account of which there are some things you should not believe, even if doing so would have very good epistemic consequences. However, we argue that by embracing side-constraints the reliabilist faces a dilemma: she can either hold on to reliabilism, and with it (...) aforementioned side-constraints, but then needs to explain why we should allow the pursuit of justification to get in the way of the acquisition of true belief; or she can deny that there are side-constraints – and in effect give up on reliabilism. We'll suggest that anyone moved by the considerations that likely attract people to reliabilism in the first place – the idea the true belief is good, and as such should be promoted – should go for the second horn, and instead pursue a form ofepistemic utilitarianism. (shrink)

Though Heidegger’s Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last hundred years, its Division Two has received relatively little attention. This outstanding collection corrects that, examining some of the central themes of Division Two and their wide-ranging and challenging implications. An international team of leading philosophers explore the crucial notions that articulate Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, including death, anxiety, conscience, guilt, resolution and temporality. In doing so, they clarify the bearing of (...) Division Two’s reflections on our understanding of intentionality, normativity, responsibility, autonomy and selfhood. These discussions raise important questions about how we may need to rethink the morals of Division One of Being and Time , the broader project to which that book was devoted, the shaping influence of figures such as Aristotle and Kierkegaard, as well as Heidegger’s relationship with his contemporaries and successors. Essential reading for students and scholars of Heidegger’s thought, and anyone interested in key debates in phenomenology, ethics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of mind. Contributors: William Blattner, Clare Carlisle, Taylor Carman, Steven Galt Crowell, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Sophia Dandelet, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, Jeffrey Haynes, Stephan Käufer, Denis McManus, Stephen Mulhall, George Pattison, Peter Poellner, Katherine Withy, Mark A. Wrathall. (shrink)

The Paradox of PostmodernismModernism is, roughly speaking, the Enlightenment belief in a single unified rational perspective, founded on some indubitable evidence given in human experience – either innate conceptsà laDescartes and the rationalists, or sensationsà laLocke and the empiricists – and elaborated according to reliable logical rules. This view was first attacked for its ‘foundationalism.’ Philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, denied that there is any indubitable given upon which truth can be founded. There is no (...) experience, no testimony of the senses or of reason that blazons forth the undeniable truth. Rather the ‘given’ is, so to speak, constructed - which is to say, not given to us, but made by us. Some experience or other evidence is interpreted as this or that with this or that epistemological status, on the basis of beliefs that one already has about, say, space or mathematics or sense perception or the nature of what is ultimately real. Postmodernism is an intensification of this attack, with a distinctive political spin. (shrink)

In a novel synthesis of Judith Butler’s social ontology, Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism, Simon Critchley’s reading of Heidegger’s ontology of indebtedness, and my own system of ontic impunity premised on the illusion of free will, I make a case for a reframing—or perhaps an unframing—of the human. This unframing imbues those largely denied recognizability as human—such as pedophiles and Muslim civilian casualties of the war on terror—with a dignity and grievability denied them by the dominant ecumenical, Western epistemology of causa sui. (...) It also forces us to consider the tenuous distinction between human and non-human animals. Finally, I offer some concluding thoughts on the meaning of authenticity as wanting-to-have-a-conscience. (shrink)

Though Heidegger’s _Being and Time_ is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last hundred years, its Division Two has received relatively little attention. This outstanding collection corrects that, examining some of the central themes of Division Two and their wide-ranging and challenging implications. An international team of leading philosophers explore the crucial notions that articulate Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, including death, anxiety, conscience, guilt, resolution and temporality. In doing so, they clarify the bearing of (...) Division Two’s reflections on our understanding of intentionality, normativity, responsibility, autonomy and selfhood. These discussions raise important questions about how we may need to rethink the morals of Division One of _Being and Time_, the broader project to which that book was devoted, the shaping influence of figures such as Aristotle and Kierkegaard, as well as Heidegger’s relationship with his contemporaries and successors. Essential reading for students and scholars of Heidegger’s thought, and anyone interested in key debates in phenomenology, ethics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of mind. _Contributors:_ William Blattner, Clare Carlisle, Taylor Carman, Steven Galt Crowell, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Sophia Dandelet, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, Jeffrey Haynes, Stephan Käufer, Denis McManus, Stephen Mulhall, George Pattison, Peter Poellner, Katherine Withy, Mark A. Wrathall. (shrink)

In a monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism, the journal's editor decontextualizes and then recontextualizes the medieval iconographic trope of Ecclesia and Synagoga in an effort to make plausible a news story about Pope Francis that received little coverage in the press. During 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate, Francis paid a surprise visit to a new statue in the United States, “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman, as a (...) sign of his endorsement of its radical reconsideration of a trope long associated with anti-Jewish sentiment in the Catholic Church. This article, which begins with a detailed analysis of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's essay on the Nostra Aetate treatise De Iudaeis, deals primarily with twelfth- and thirteenth-century uses of the iconography. Special attention is paid to the Anagogical Window of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and to the Ecclesia, Synagoga, and King Solomon statues on the south facade of Strasbourg Cathedral, in both of which is found previously overlooked evidence of philo-Semitic, rather than anti-Semitic, thinking on the part of the designers. The article concludes that contextualist scholars of medieval art have found what they expected to find and ignored contrary indications. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker is an actualist who holds that merely possible worlds are uninstantiated properties that might have been instantiated. Stalnaker also holds that there are no metaphysically impossible worlds: uninstantiated properties that couldn't have been instantiated. These views motivate Stalnaker's "two dimensional" account of the necessary a posteriori on which there is no single proposition that is both necessary and a posteriori. For a (metaphysically) necessary proposition is true in all (metaphysically) possible worlds. If there were necessary a posteriori propositions, (...) that would mean that there were propositions true in all possible worlds but which could only be known to be true by acquiring empirical evidence. Consider such a purported proposition P. The role of empirical evidence for establishing P's truth would have to be to rule out worlds in which P is false. If there were no such worlds to be ruled out, we would not require evidence for P. But by hypothesis, P is necessary and so true in all metaphysically possible worlds. And on Stalnaker's view, the metaphysically possible worlds are all the worlds there are. So there can be no proposition that is true in all possible worlds, but that we require evidence to know. In this way, the motivation for Stalnaker's two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori rests on his denying that there are metaphysically impossible Worlds. I argue that given his view of what possible worlds are, Stalnaker has no principled reason for denying that there are metaphysically impossible worlds. If I am right, this undercuts Stalnaker's motivation for his two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori. (shrink)

Heidegger’s Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last century. This outstanding collection examines the major themes of Division Two of Being and Time , which has received relatively little attention compared to Division One. Leading philosophers examine important topics such as authenticity, death, guilt and time, the influence of Kierkegaard, and the relationship between Heidegger’s work and ancient and medieval philosophy. Essential reading for scholars and students of Heidegger’s thought and (...) anyone interested in key debates in phenomenology. Contributors: William Blattner, Clare Carlisle, Taylor Carman, Steven Galt Crowell, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, Jeffrey Haynes, Stephan Käufer, Denis McManus, Stephen Mulhall, George Pattison, Peter Poellner, Katherine Withy, Mark A. Wrathall. (shrink)

A many-worlds interpretation is of quantum mechanics tells us that the linear equations of motion are the true and complete laws for the time-evolution of every physical system and that the usual quantum-mechanical states provide complete descriptions of all possible physical situations. Such an interpretation, however, denies the standard way of understanding quantum-mechanical states. When the pointer on a measuring device is in a superposition of pointing many different directions, for example, we are to understand this as many pointers, each (...) in a differentworld, each pointing in a different determinate direction. We ask here whether such talk makes any genuinely intelligible sense of the term world. We conclude that it does not. (shrink)

This paper addresses the debate surrounding epistocracy. While many discussions of epistocracy focus on its instrumental defenses, this paper aims to critically examine the non-instrumental jury argument offered by Jason Brennan. Brennan’s argument equates the rights of individuals in political decisions to their rights in jury decisions, asserting that just as individuals have a right to a competent jury, they likewise have a right to a competent electorate. We disagree. By juxtaposing the costs of enforcing such rights and the severity (...) of the harm prevented by their enforcement, this paper argues in favor of maintaining the right to a competent jury while denying the existence of a right to a competent electorate. The central claim is that while securing a competent jury is feasible and vital, attempting to secure a competent electorate poses significant challenges and may prevent less significant harm than perceived. (shrink)

The philosophical debate on miracles in Enlightenment England shows the composite and evolutionary character of the English Enlightenment and, more generally, of the Enlightenment’s relation to religion. In fact, that debate saw the confrontation of divergent positions within the Protestant field and led several deists and freethinkers to resolutely deny the possibility of “things above reason” (i.e. things that, according to such Protestant philosophers as Robert Boyle and John Locke, human reason can neither comprehend nor refute, and that humanity must (...) thus receive as supernatural). In their attacks on miracles, the deists adopted various strategies, which can be classified in two main groups. On the one hand, Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, and Peter Annet, although employing different concepts of reason and having different views of God and nature, rejected miracles on the basis that God is unable to contravene the eternal, immutable, and mechanical laws of nature. On the other, William Wollaston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and Thomas Morgan, whose theories on natural religion presented striking similarities, saw God as unwilling to interpose in human or natural affairs. They shunned the possibility of miraculous events while simultaneously acknowledging the presence and efficacy of divine providence in the government of the universe. In other words, they considered God as the active governor of the universe, rather than a distant and inert clockmaker removed from his Creation, but they held that God would not suspend the laws of nature, in which his impartial wisdom, forethought, and goodness found perfect expression. (shrink)

In this paper, we critically appraise institutions for people with disabilities, from residential facilities to outpatient clinics to social organizations. While recognizing that a just and inclusive society would reject virtually all segregated institutional arrangements, we argue that in contemporary American society, some people with disabilities may have needs that at this time can best be met by institutional arrangements. We propose ways of reforming institutions to make them less isolating, coercive, and stigmatizing, and to provide forms of social support (...) the larger society denies many people with disabilities. Although these reforms far fall far short of abolition, they draw heavily on the work of disability scholars and advocates who call for the complete replacement of institutional arrangements with systems of supported living. The consideration of non-ideal-solutions is useful not only in reforming existing institutional arrangements, but in bringing disability scholarship and advocacy to bear on bioethics, which has paid little attention to institutions for people with disabilities. We intend this paper to redress the neglect within mainstream bioethics of the complex ethical problems posed by institutions. (shrink)

The notion of "relevance" in philosophy is ultimately determined by a notion of "utility" that has been present in American culture from very early on. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville stated that "Democratic nations... prefer the useful to the beautiful, and... require that the beautiful should be useful". Today, the issues of utility and relevance are motivations for a congress which threatens to drastically cut funding for humanities programs around the country. At a time when employment in the academy is (...) sporadic at best, how might one respond philosophically in light of the current congressional threat? John Lachs responds by criticizing what he calls, "the professionalization of philosophy". Rather than focusing inquiries on the problems and concerns of everyday life, philosophers "linger over abstract details of technique". Ultimately, Lachs' concern is that such hyperspecialization will only alienate the practice of philosophy from the rest of society: "so long as philosophers talk about philosophical texts to other philosophers in a mysterious philosophical language, they cannot keep faith with their mission. Isolated and irrelevant, we will become the butt of jokes, and our departments will be marked... for eradication". In contrast to such "professionalization," Lachs provides us with a book of essays that are "united by the belief that philosophical reflection can yield results and by the desire to harness them to the service of improving life". Lest the reader too quickly assume the facile distinction between "history of philosophy" and "original philosophy," it must be noted that Lachs brings a wealth of knowledge regarding historical figures to bear on the problems which he addresses. One finds Aristotle, Hegel, Mill, James, Peirce, Santayana, Dewey and others, all being invoked in the interest of elucidating and understanding issues such as dogmatism, violence, alienation, technology, education, law, and euthanasia Lachs' overriding concern, however, is that of "mediating relations" "in which individuals perform actions on behalf of others". While such relations may be necessary in order to allow people to perform specialized societal roles more efficiently, they also separate people from the other specialized roles in which they do not take part. The unfortunate consequence is that most people do not have "even an elementary understanding of social life, economic reality, the interplay of activity and happiness, or the structure and needs of our bodies," because "the mediated world denies them the opportunity to learn by direct experience". Relevant philosophy must clear away the abstract and specialized language, which alienates the normal reader and draws philosophers away from learning by direct experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lachs' prose is extremely clear and accessible. Such prose works exceptionally well in "Life And Death", where Lachs engages the difficult questions regarding the constitution of a human life, the viewing of death as "a natural and appropriate end to a satisfying life", and the termination of the "lives" of beings who--like the hydroencephalic child --cannot develop into actual human beings, but remain only as "human forms". Whether one agrees with Lachs' positions on these issues or not, his straightforward and unmediated prose bespeaks a courage which is admirable. (shrink)

Building Better Health Care Leadership for Canada explains the development and implementation of the Executive Training in Research Application program. Managed and funded by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation in partnership with the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Nursing Association, and the Canadian College of Health Care executives, EXTRA is a two-year national fellowship program that uses the principles of adult learning theory as well as practical projects to educate senior health care leaders in making more consistent use of (...) research evidence in their management roles. Fellows apply the theory learned in residency sessions and educational activities to projects within their home organizations. The authors identify the imperative for better use of evidence, outline the core elements of the curriculum, and capture the real-world experience of regional leaders and fellows involved in making specific changes informed by research-based evidence within their organization. Contributors include Jean-Louis Denis, Terrence Sullivan, Owen Adams, Malcolm Anderson, Lynda Atack, Robert Bell, Sam G Campbell, Sylvie Cantin, Ward Flemons, Dorothy Forbes, J. Sonja Glass, Paula Goering, Karen Golden-Biddle, Jeffrey S. Hoch, Paul Lamarche, Ann Langley, John N. Lavis, Jonathan Lomas, Margo Orchard, Raynald Pineault, Brian D. Postl, Christine Power, Trish Reay, Jean Rochon, Denis A. Roy, Andrea Seymour, Samuel B. Sheps, Micheline Ste-Marie, Nina Stipich, David Streiner, Carl Taillon, and Muriah Umoquit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Question of Style in Philosophy and the ArtsJeffrey R. Di LeoThe Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Caroline van Eck, James McAllister and Renée van de Vall; xi & 245 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, $49.95.The question, “Should philosophers concern themselves with questions of style?” motivates this rich collection of twelve essays on the interrelatedness of content and its formal representation in (...) both philosophical writing and the arts. Alongside issues such as aestheticized forms of philosophizing and the relationship between method and style, there are articles on Heinrich von Kleist’s Marionettentheater, the graphic works of William Hogarth, Alexis de Tocqueville’s use of metaphor and paradox, the use of ellipses in Johannes Kepler’s astronomical theories, and eclecticism in eighteenth-century English architecture.Style has been an explicit concern for historians and theorists of the arts long before it came to the fore in philosophy. The editors think philosophers can learn a lot not only about the concept of style but also about philosophical style by looking into the practices of musicians, architects, and painters and by thinking about how styles are formed, transformed, and understood in the arts. By comparing the arts and philosophy, we can move toward something lacking in contemporary discussions, namely stylistic categories specific to philosophy. Richard Wollheim’s essay, for example, offers many categories appropriate to painting that could be relevant to philosophical writing.A provocative point traced here is that until the end of the eighteenth century, “style” had little to do with the meaning of a work of art—the term merely denoted an artwork’s place in the hierarchy of art. Before 1800, there was hardly a question of choice among styles: contributions to a practice were regarded not as belonging to one style or another, but as falling within or being alien to a practice. Only in the early nineteenth century did style become a key element in the meaning of a work, when it took the place previously occupied by nature, antiquity, or absolute standards of reason. With the traditional bearers of meaning gone, one could no longer look to content for meaning, and artists turned to style to create meaningful art—style being that aspect of writing, painting, or building traditionally associated with ornament, that could be varied without changing the content. Gradually, the “variable” element in art became the prime bearer of meaning.The claim here is that an analogous transition from stylistic monism to pluralism occurred in philosophy about a century after it did in art. This shift away from the monistic geometrical and mathematical standards of philosophical reasoning established in the late sixteenth century was brought about by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Lambert Weising suggests that, with Wittgenstein, there is a substitution of style for truth—a point which seems equally true of others, notably Nietzsche. A consequence of this new [End Page 187] pluralism is a loosening of what can be called philosophical reasoning, and an increasing receptiveness to and acceptance of a diversity of philosophical styles. Questions of style do tend to arise in connections with philosophers of the literary sort—Plato or Kierkegaard. Now philosophers have much less difficulty regarding as philosophical a work such as Pascal’s Pensées, which has traditionally been treated more as literature than as philosophy.One of the challenges of this collection is to refute the view of those who deny that the content of their philosophical writing depends at all on style. This would give support to a thesis defended by Martha Nussbaum in this journal in 1983: “No stylistic choice can be presumed to be neutral—not even the choice to write in a flat or neutral style” (p. 146). Beryl Lang, who has addressed this question in other books and articles, argues that style is relevant to all philosophical writing, even that professed to be “style-less.” Lang correctly shows that philosophers’ general disregard for expressiveness, and their belief that the proper philosophical method will lead all who follow it to the same results, has itself become a feature of philosophical writing. So “style-less” writing is a philosophical... (shrink)

Direct neurological and especially imaging-driven investigations into the structures essential to naturally occurring cognitive systems in their development and operation have motivated broadening interest in the potential for artificial consciousness modeled on these systems. This first paper in a series of three begins with a brief review of Boltuc’s (2009) “brain-based” thesis on the prospect of artificial consciousness, focusing on his formulation of h-consciousness. We then explore some of the implications of brain research on the structure of consciousness, finding limitations (...) in biological approaches to the study of consciousness. Looking past these limitations, we introduce research in artificial consciousness designed to test for the emergence of consciousness, a phenomenon beyond the purview of the study of existing biological systems. (shrink)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting (...) the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness. (shrink)