(2013). Critical notice of Aaron James, Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 382-401.

There has recently been much debate about the idea of levying a tax on particular transactions on international financial markets. Economists have argued about how much revenue such an international financial transaction tax would raise and they disagree about what effects it would have on trade volumes, financial stability, and overall growth. Politicians have argued about the feasibility of introducing such a tax internationally and they disagree on its adequacy as a policy response to the current financial and economic crisis. (...) This article contributes to the debate about international financial transaction taxation by bringing the perspective of political philosophy to bear on the politicians’ and economists’ arguments about policy. I shall outline a framework for thinking about justice in finance, and defend the idea of an international financial transaction tax as an instrument for making the international financial system more just. (shrink)

Economic theory teaches that it is in every country’s interest to trade. Trade is a voluntary activity among consenting parties. On this view, considerations of justice have little bearing on trade, and political philosophers concerned with global justice should stay largely silent on trade. According to a very different view that has recently gained prominence, international trade can only occur before the background of an international market reliance practice shaped by states. Trade is a shared activity among states, and all (...) participating states have in principle equal claims to gains from trade. Trade then becomes a central topic for political philosophers. Both views are problematic. A third view about the role of trade in a theory of global justice is then presented, which gives pride of place to a notion of exploitation. The other two views should be abandoned. (shrink)

This paper offers a new version of a historically influential, yet today unpopular, neglected, and on the whole insufficiently developed argument for socialism: socialism makes it possible for people to really act together. This idea of socialist action, combining the claims that there is a particularly valuable form of joint action and that socialism is about making such action possible, played an important role in the history of the labor movement, going back to the early Marx and running through various (...) strands of socialist thought. I shall argue that socialist action should be seen as central to the socialist project, its critique of capitalism, and the institutional alternatives envisaged by it. (shrink)

Nobody has offered such a comprehensive philosophical approach to trade. Nonetheless, James's approach does not succeed. First, we explore James's constructivist method, which does less work than he suggests. The second topic is James's take on the different ‘grounds’ of justice. We explore the shortcomings of approaches that focus exclusively on trade. Our third topic is why James thinks trade is such a ground. The fourth topic is how James argues for his proposed ‘structural equity.’ This proposal remains under-argued. Our (...) fifth topic is to explore why structural equity would generate several specific principles. Finally, we discuss James's notion of autarky. Autarky sets the benchmark for James's ideas about how to divide gains of trade. We doubt that it can do so. (shrink)

Some political philosophers believe that equality emerges as a moral concern where and because people coerce each other. I shall argue that they are wrong. The idea of coercion as a trigger of equality is neither as plausible nor as powerful as it may initially appear. Those who rely on the idea that coercion is among the conditions that give rise to equality as a moral demand face a threefold challenge. They will have to succeed in jointly (a) offering a (...) convincing account of the wrongness of coercion, (b) rendering cogent the idea that the demand of equality arises in response to the moral problem of coercion, and (c) identifying some types of interaction as relevantly coercive. This challenge, I believe, cannot be met. More precisely, I argue that two important accounts of coercion fail to meet it. (shrink)

John Rawls famously claims that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’. On one of its readings, this remark seems to suggest that social institutions are essential for obligations of justice to arise. The spirit of this interpretation has recently sparked a new debate about the grounds of justice. What are the conditions that generate principles of distributive justice? I am interested in a specific version of this question. What conditions generate egalitarian principles of distributive justice and give rise (...) to equality as a demand of justice? My paper focuses on relationalist answers to this question. Advocates of relationalism assume that ‘principles of distributive justice have a relational basis’, in the sense that ‘practice mediated relations in which individuals stand condition the content, scope and justification of those principles’. To say that principles of justice are ‘based’ on and ‘conditioned’ by practice mediated relations is ambiguous. I will here be concerned with advocates of what I call the relationalist requirement , viz. positions which assume that ‘practice mediated relations’ constitute a necessary existence condition for principles of egalitarian distributive justice. Relationalists who endorse this view come in different varieties. My focus is on relationalists that view social and political institutions as the relevant ‘practice mediated relation’. The question at stake, then, is this: Are institutionally mediated relations a necessary condition for equality to arise as a demand of justice? Strong relationalists of the institutionalist cast, call them advocates of the institutionalist requirement , differ in important respects. They argue about what set of institutions is foundationally significant, and they disagree on why only that institutional relation gives rise to egalitarian obligations of justice. My paper engages two ways of arguing for the institutionalist requirement : Julius’s framing argument and Andrea Sangiovanni’s reciprocity argument . The issue at stake are the grounds of egalitarian justice and I will argue that the institutionalist requirement is mistaken. It is not the case that egalitarian obligations of distributive justice arise only between and solely in virtue of individuals sharing a common institution. (shrink)

Just institutions have claims on us. There are two reasons for thinking that such claims are warranted. First, one may believe that we are under a natural duty of justice to support and further just institutions. If one believes that it matters whether institutions are just, one also has a reason, almost as a matter of consistency, to support and further just institutions. Second, one may believe that by enjoying the benefits brought about by cooperation through just institutions, one incurs (...) an obligation to support these institutions. Those who accept and enjoy the benefits brought about by cooperation through a just scheme are under an obligation of fairness to reciprocate. But what happens to these reasons to support and comply with an institution if the scheme of cooperation is less than fully just? There is hardly a real-world institution, policy, or scheme of social cooperation that would qualify as fully just. However, questions about obligations of fairness and duties of justice under conditions of injustice have hitherto suffered relative neglect. I shall outline an overall framework for thinking about these questions by asking what the victims of injustice owe to moderately unjust institutions. (shrink)

Some contractualist egalitarians try to accommodate a concern for numbers by embracing a pluralist strategy. They incorporate the belief that the number of people affected matters for what distribution one ought to bring about by arguing that their primary contractualist concern for justifiability to each may be outweighed by aggregative considerations. The present contribution offers two arguments against such a pluralist strategy. First, I argue that advo- cates of the pluralist strategy are forced to abandon the rationale behind the criterion (...) of universal acceptability. Second, I show that pluralist contractualists will be unable to avoid the dreaded conclusion that originally motivated their contractualism. Ultimately, these arguments matter for the nature of egalitarian- ism. They should give those in search of sound distributive principles a reason to make sense of their egalitarian commitment in a non-contractualist way. If a sound set of distributive principles includes comparative and relational princi- ples, while contractualist egalitarianism does not lend itself to being pluralistically combined with non-individualist principles, telic egalitarianism may after all be part of the truth in distributive ethics. (shrink)

Most philosophical examinations of the concept of exploitation center on analyzing two-party interactions between individuals. Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner introduce an account of exploitation that seeks to transcend this ‘individualist paradigm’ in three ways: Through exploitation of and by agential groups, of or by non-agential groups and by social structures. In this paper, I argue that while the concepts of non-individual and structural exploitation do offer each their way of transcending or revising the individualist paradigm, the most (...) ambitious and original attempt to break with the paradigm is offered by the concept of non-agential exploitation. I then discuss this concept, but ultimately conclude that it suffers from too many shortcomings in its current form to offer a plausible departure from the individualist approach. (shrink)

Bd. 1. A-B -- Bd. 2. C-F -- Bd. 3. G-Inn -- Bd. 4. Ins-Loc.

This important collection of lectures and essays was regarded by Gabriel Marcel as the best introduction to his thought.

v. 1. Reflection & mystery -- v. 2. Faith & reality.

Famously, in the essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Prize Essay), Kant attempts to distance himself from the Wolffian model of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, Kant scholars have pointed out Kant’s claim that philosophy should not imitate the method of mathematics and his appeal to Newton’s “analytic method.” In this article, I argue that there is an aspect of Kant’s critique of the Wolffian model that has been neglected. Kant presents a powerful (...) attack of the idea that philosophy should proceed through the analysis of concepts and argues that we should give up the aim of arriving at “complete” concepts as one of its fundamental desiderata. Importantly, this attack of philosophy conceived as conceptual analysis is distinctive and original if one compares it with Kant’s critique of analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason, which rests on the idea that analysis is insufficient to ground substantial metaphysical truths. I also make an additional point: Scholars have debated whether the appeal to Newton’s analytic method involves a form of empiricism. I submit that this debate is ill-conceived because Kant uses a notion of “given concepts” that is indeterminate with respect to their a priori or a posteriori status. (shrink)

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

The intellectual resistance to totalitarian regimes can take many forms. This remarkable volume portrays one such story of resistance in Romania during the reign of Ceausescu: that of Constantin Noica, one of the country's foremost intellectuals. The Paltinis Diary is a wonderful homage to an intellectual master and to the power of intellect and freedom. The book will be of interest to philosophers, non-philosophers alike, and to anyone who seeks to grasp the true meaning of survival under totalitarian conditions.

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)

This discussion of pride, shame, and guilt centers on the beliefs involved in the experience of any of these emotions. Through a detailed study, the author demonstrates how these beliefs are alike--in that they are all directed towards the self--and how they differ. The experience of these three emotions are illustrated by examples taken from English literature. These concrete cases supply a context for study and indicate the complexity of the situations in which these emotions usually occur.

Recent epidemiological research on the social determinants of health has been used to attack an important framework, associated with Norman Daniels, that depicts healthcare as special. My aim is to rescue the idea that healthcare has special importance in society, although specialness will turn out to be mainly limited to clinical care. I build upon the link between Daniels's theory and the work of John Rawls to develop a conception of public justification liberalism that is suitable to the field of (...) justice and health. I argue that, from the perspective of public justification liberalism, (clinical) healthcare deserves special status. (shrink)

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South (...) African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish three general approaches to public trust in science, which I call the individual approach, the semi-social approach, and the social approach, and critically examine their proposed solutions to what I call the problem of harmful distrust. I argue that, despite their differences, the individual and the semi-social approaches see the solution to the problem of harmful distrust as consisting primarily in trying to persuade individual citizens to trust science and that both approaches face two general (...) problems, which I call the problem of overidealizing science and the problem of overburdening citizens. I then argue that in order to avoid these problems we need to embrace a (thoroughly) social approach to public trust in science, which emphasizes the social dimensions of the reception, transmission, and uptake of scientific knowledge in society and the ways in which social forces influence both positively and negatively the trustworthiness of science. (shrink)

Intimacy: From Transformation to Transmutation The paper reflects the historical and current dynamism of the concept of intimacy. Besides differences between scientific disciplines in understanding what the substance of intimacy is, the recent discourse on change in intimacy has been dominated by the transformation theme introduced by Anthony Giddens (1992). Led by reflections of Richard Sennett (1986) the author draws attention to the opposite aspect of change in intimacy—the change in content, or the "transmutation" of intimacy. Transmutation of intimacy—the substitution (...) of the satisfaction of intimate needs with identity creation—not only contests the very essence of intimacy, but also constitutes a significant challenge for the project of intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003). (shrink)

In this paper, I develop Mauricio Suárez’s distinction between denotation, epistemic representation, and faithful epistemic representation. I then outline an interpretational account of epistemic representation, according to which a vehicle represents a target for a certain user if and only if the user adopts an interpretation of the vehicle in terms of the target, which would allow them to perform valid (but not necessarily sound) surrogative inferences from the model to the system. The main difference between the interpretational conception I (...) defend here and Suárez’s inferential conception is that the interpretational account is a substantial account—interpretation is not just a “symptom” of representation; it is what makes something an epistemic representation of a something else. (shrink)

Carnap’s seminal ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ makes important use of the notion of a framework and the related distinction between internal and external questions. But what exactly is a framework? And what role does the internal/external distinction play in Carnap’s metaontology? In an influential series of papers, Matti Eklund has recently defended a bracingly straightforward interpretation: A Carnapian framework, Eklund says, is just a natural language. To ask an internal question, then, is just to ask a question in, say, English. (...) To try to ask an external question is to try, absurdly, to ask a question in no language at all. Finding that so trivial an I/e distinction can’t help to explain Carnap’s deflationary metaontology, Eklund is led to attribute to Carnap a view he calls ontological pluralism. In this paper, I show that Eklund misreads Carnap, and I argue that this misreading obscures fundamental features of Carnap’s philosophy. I then defend an account of frameworks as what Carnap called semantical systems, and I place this account in the context of Carnap’s philosophical program of explication. Finally, I discuss the role that frameworks and the I/e distinction play in ESO, showing that ESO provides no reason to attribute the doctrine of ontological pluralism to Carnap. (shrink)

Per una sociosemiotica della comunicazione musicale -- Per una sociosemiotica dei generi musicali -- Per una sociosemiotica della novità in musica -- Per una sociosemiotica del dubstep.

Those who wish to claim that all facts about grounding are themselves grounded (“the meta-grounding thesis”) must defend against the charge that such a claim leads to infinite regress and violates the well-foundedness of ground. In this paper, we defend. First, we explore three distinct but related notions of “well-founded”, which are often conflated, and three corresponding notions of infinite regress. We explore the entailment relations between these notions. We conclude that the meta-grounding thesis need not lead to tension with (...) any of the three notions of “well-founded”. Finally, we explore the details of and motivations for further conditions on ground that one might add to generate a conflict between the meta-grounding thesis and a well-founded constraint. We explore these topics by developing and utilizing a formal framework based on the notion of a grounding structure. (shrink)

The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcel's discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary, e.g.: * Our crisis is a metaphysical, not merely social, one. * What a man is depends partly on what he thinks he is, and (...) a materialistic philosophy turns men into things. * Can a man be free except in a free country? * Stoicism is no longer a workable philosophy because today pressure can be put on the mind as well as on the body. * Technical progress is not evil in itself, but a technique is a means that, regarded as an end, can become either an idol or an excuse for self-idolatry. State control of scientific research, leading to a concentration on new means of destruction, is a calamity. * Fanaticism is an opinion that refuses to argue, and so the fanatic is an enemy of truth. * The kind of unification that science is bringing about today is really an ironing out of differences, but the only valuable kind of unity is one that implies a respect for differences. * We must beware of thinking in terms of great numbers and so blinding ourselves to the reality of individual suffering. Our philosophical approach to being is made possible only by our practical approach to our neighbor. * We must encourage the spirit of fraternity and distrust the kind of egalitarianism that is based on envy and resentment. * No man however humble should feel that he cannot spread the light among his friends. No easy solution is offered, but the author conveys his own faith that ultimately love and intelligence will triumph. (shrink)

Gabriel Richardson Lear presents a bold new approach to one of the enduring debates about Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the controversy about whether it coherently argues that the best life for humans is one devoted to a single activity, namely philosophical contemplation. Many scholars oppose this reading because the bulk of the Ethics is devoted to various moral virtues--courage and generosity, for example--that are not in any obvious way either manifestations of philosophical contemplation or subordinated to it. They argue that (...) Aristotle was inconsistent, and that we should not try to read the entire Ethics as an attempt to flesh out the notion that the best life aims at the "monistic good" of contemplation. In defending the unity and coherence of the Ethics, Lear argues that, in Aristotle's view, we may act for the sake of an end not just by instrumentally bringing it about but also by approximating it. She then argues that, for Aristotle, the excellent rational activity of moral virtue is an approximation of theoretical contemplation. Thus, the happiest person chooses moral virtue as an approximation of contemplation in practical life. Richardson Lear bolsters this interpretation by examining three moral virtues--courage, temperance, and greatness of soul--and the way they are fine. Elegantly written and rigorously argued, this is a major contribution to our understanding of a central issue in Aristotle's moral philosophy. (shrink)

El Estado de Hegel es el Estado de Derecho. Sin embargo en su Filosofía del Derecho se encuentran fundamentos decisivos para una teoría del Estado Social. Siguiendo el hilo de las Líneas fundamentales de la Filosofía del Derecho, se empieza por ver el derecho al bienestar, tal como se formula en la Moralidad (1). En la familia aparece el derecho de los hijos "de ser alimentados y educados" (2). El Derecho al bienestar se concreta en la sociedad civil (3), se (...) hace posible en el sistema de las necesidades (3.1.) y efectivo en la policía y la corporación (3.2 y 3.3), que ejercen funciones de suplencia de la familia. El mayor problema es la pobreza, tanto la que surge por contingencias subjetivas y sociales como por el funcionamiento mismo de la sociedad civil: la plebe. A este problema la sociedad es incapaz de darle una solución. (shrink)

In Being and Time Heidegger gives preference to Hegel’s ontology of time over earlier conceptions of time, on account of his insight that time is in some sense neither subjective nor objective. However, he objects to Hegel’s method of unfolding the concept of time, which according to him relapses into a “vulgar” conception of presence as an empty point. Heidegger confuses Hegel’s method with an object-level claim about the ontology of time and, therefore, misses—among other things—the crucial Hegelian insight from (...) the philosophy of nature and subjective spirit that time has to be embodied by thinkers. Historical time is not an automated, ontotheological process of absolute spirit’s self-revelation, but rather a conception of the human being as free agent. (shrink)

The influence of movement skill on action representations and identification of agency was investigated. Point-light displays were created of highly skilled gestures of thirteen orchestral conductors in visual, auditory, and audiovisual versions and compared to two control conditions . In subsequent experimental sessions, participants indicated whether displays presented them or other conductors, whether the soundtrack contained their or others’ musical interpretations, and rated the quality and emotional content of the gestures. Self-recognition was more accurate in conditions presenting highly skilled conducting (...) movements as compared to other displays. Participants judged the quality of their own movements to be better than those of others, independently of whether or not they recognized movement agency. Emotional content was perceived accurately across conditions both for own and others’ actions. These results point to the influence of dynamical characteristics of motor skill, rather than merely type of movement or emotional content, on action representations and self-other identification. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to provide an account of the role played by logic in the context of what Husserl names the “crisis of European sciences.” Presupposing the analyses offered in the Krisis, I look at Formale und Transzendentale Logik to demonstrate that the crisis of logic stems from the deviation of its original meaning as a “theory of science” and from its restriction to a mere “theoretical technique.” Through a comparison between Aristotelian syllogistic and modern logic, I (...) show why the modern discovery of the purely formal dimension of knowledge which makes possible such a mathematical technization is a positive achievement that hinders at the same time the disclosure of the truly philosophical nature of logic. The correct appraisal of this ambiguous phenomenon will explain why the rise of modern logic represents a decisive challenge for the success of Husserl’s late phenomenological project. (shrink)

Sociologists often ask why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do. I argue that sociology’s empirical research on morality relies, implicitly or explicitly, on unsophisticated and even obsolete ethical theories, and thus is based on inadequate conceptions of the ontology, epistemology, and semantics of morality. In this article I address the two main problems in the sociology of morality: (1) the problem of moral truth, and (2) the problem of value freedom. I identify two ideal–typical approaches. (...) While the Weberian paradigm rejects the concept of moral truth, the Durkheimian paradigm accepts it. By contrast, I argue that sociology should be metaphysically agnostic, yet in practice it should proceed as though there were no moral truths. The Weberians claim that the sociology of morality can and should be value free; the Durkheimians claim that it cannot and it should not. My argument is that, while it is true that factual statements presuppose value judgments, it does not follow that sociologists are moral philosophers in disguise. Finally, I contend that in order for sociology to improve its understanding of morality, better conceptual, epistemological, and methodological foundations are needed. (shrink)