In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bernard Harrison THE TRUTH ABOUT METAPHOR GOTTLOB frece introduced into philosophy two doctrines whose subsequent influence, on analytic philosophers at least, has been momentous. One is the doctrine that to understand a sentence is to know how to set about establishing die trudi-value of an assertion couched in those words. The other is the doctrine that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence. These (...) doctrines make it hard to understand metaphor. They create difficulties, especially, for any theory of metaphor which assumes the intelligibility of talk about two kinds of meaning, literal and metaphorical. Frege's doctrines allow only one kind of meaning: one connected essentially with the issue of truth and falsity. But it is only when we take them literally that metaphorical sentences acquire a truth value: usually false. Two obvious suggestions offer ways of getting around this. The first is the suggestion diat metaphors are condensed or disguised similes: true or (sometimes) false statements about similarity. The second is the suggestion that a term used in a metaphorical context just has a different literal meaning from the one it has in a sentence intended to be taken literally. Neither is very plausible. The first reduces a metaphorical comparison, "Man is a wolf," to a literal statement of similarity, "Men are like wolves." But what similarity, exactly, is the statement supposed to be asserting? Perhaps that men prey upon one anodier, as wolves are supposed to do. But dien "prey" can only be meant metaphorically, at which point die puzzle revives. As Goodman says of die attempt to find a simile in the metaphorical assertion diat a picture is sad, "What die simile says in effect is that person and picture are alike in being sad, die one literally and the odier metaphorically. Instead of metaphor reducing to simile, simile reduces to metaphor; or radier, the difference between simile and metaphor is negligible." ' 38 Bernard Harrison39 An equally fatal objection to the second suggestion is diat it is only ifwe take die terms which compose a metaphor in their plain everyday senses that they compose a metaphor. As R. M. J. Dammann puts it, "IfGod is a rock in a different sense from that in which Gibraltar is one, then both are really, literally, rocks, just as what one buys in a sweetshop is rock, though a dissatisfied customer might call it such metaphorically."2 It cannot, in odier words, be literally true diat die process of understanding a metaphor involves changing the sense ofits constituent expressions, odierwise metaphor would evaporate in die reader's grasp into literality. What this suggests is diat what makes a sentence metaphorical is not any change in the meaning of its constituent expressions, but the way in which those expressions, with dieir plain everyday meanings, are combined in the sentence. What we need, perhaps, ifwe are to begin to understand metaphor, is not a dieory ofmetaphorical meaning, but an account of what it is to assert metaphorically: an account, diat is, which would operate at the level of die sentence rather than at diat of die word. But this returns us to Frege's two doctrines. If the meaning of a word is to be wholly identified with die contribution it makes to die determination of a truth value for each sentence in which it occurs, dien it is difficult to see how the constituents of a sentence could determine anything odier than a plain, literal meaning for the sentence as a whole. What I shall try to show in this essay is that this difficulty can be overcome : that we can give a satisfactory account of the semantic mechanisms of metaphor without giving up either of Frege's doctrines. As Frege thought, understanding a sentence is knowing how to set about establishing the truth or falsity ofassertions couched in diose words. But to say what, exacdy, someone knows in knowing diat demands, I shall argue, a more complicated story than Fregeans have supposed. First, diough, I want to consider a more radical strategy dian mine for squaring Frege's doctrines with our experience of metaphor, proposed by Donald Davidson.3 Davidson holds widi Frege that the... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III.

This chapter brings together Murdoch’s thoughts about language with other central aspects of her thought such as love, attention, perfectionism and morality. By making clear how Murdoch’s variety of linguistic philosophy differs from contemporary philosophy of language, this paper also shows that Murdoch’s philosophy contains the seeds for a fruitful form of philosophizing which brings the moral and aesthetic dimensions of language into view. “Taking the linguistic method seriously” means making clear the ways in which (...) all concepts belong to a fabric that is changing on a personal level as well as an historical one. One of the things that Murdoch can help us see is that one problem with contemporary philosophy of language, is that it does not take the linguistic method seriously enough. (shrink)

Bernard Harrison; XIII—Meaning and Mental Images, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 237–250, https://doi.org/10.10.

This paper attempts to refute the familiar sceptical argument based upon the theoretical possibility of systematic transpositions of colours in different observers? colour?vision. The force of this argument lies in its apparent demonstration that cases of transposed colour?vision would be on a quite different cognitive footing from ordinary cases of colour?blindness; since colour transposition, unlike colour?blindness, could not possibly have any effect on the use of language by a person who suffered from it. It is argued (1) that this (...) demonstration works only if we assume the truth of a certain theory of the logical nature of our colour vocabulary, and (2) that this theory is false. (shrink)

‘I see well enough what poor Kant would be at’ said James Mill on first looking into the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. No one would wish to say that the reception of Kant in England has remained at this level: abundance of sound scholarship, innumerable Kant seminars and the swell of interest in transcendental argument which has developed since the Second World War all exist to prove the contrary. But in spite of all that, Mill's response still touches a chord (...) in English breasts. We are prone to think Kant a conjurer. If we are to accept, or even to work seriously with, any version of Kantianism it must be a demythologized, logically aseptic version. Strawson's Kant, for instance, is a Kant freed from the ‘strained analogy’ between the study of the conditions of sense, or intelligibility, and the study of the human cognitive system. And in moral philosophy too, the English Kantianism chiefly represented by the work of Professor R. M. Hare has scrupulously avoided those parts of Kant's ethics which have a suspiciously speculative flavour: the notion of an unqualified good, for example, or that of treating moral agents as Ends-in-Themselves; and more generally the whole notion, which permeates Kant's moral philosophy, that morality can only ultimately be understood in terms of a set of ideal relationships that entirely transcend all considerations of common-sense mutual accommodation or rational self-interest: transcend all such considerations so radically, in fact, as to point mutely towards the possibility of a life after death. (shrink)

‘I see well enough what poor Kant would be at’ said James Mill on first looking into the Kritik der reinen Vernunft . No one would wish to say that the reception of Kant in England has remained at this level: abundance of sound scholarship, innumerable Kant seminars and the swell of interest in transcendental argument which has developed since the Second World War all exist to prove the contrary. But in spite of all that, Mill's response still touches a (...) chord in English breasts. We are prone to think Kant a conjurer. If we are to accept, or even to work seriously with, any version of Kantianism it must be a demythologized, logically aseptic version. Strawson's Kant, for instance, is a Kant freed from the ‘strained analogy’ between the study of the conditions of sense, or intelligibility, and the study of the human cognitive system. And in moral philosophy too, the English Kantianism chiefly represented by the work of Professor R. M. Hare has scrupulously avoided those parts of Kant's ethics which have a suspiciously speculative flavour: the notion of an unqualified good, for example, or that of treating moral agents as Ends-in-Themselves; and more generally the whole notion, which permeates Kant's moral philosophy, that morality can only ultimately be understood in terms of a set of ideal relationships that entirely transcend all considerations of common-sense mutual accommodation or rational self-interest: transcend all such considerations so radically, in fact, as to point mutely towards the possibility of a life after death. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Anti ‐ Realism and Meaning Two Types of Anti ‐ Realism What Functions Are “Language ‐ Games” Supposed to Serve? Realism and (Dummett's) Anti ‐ Realism Resisting Transcendentalism Wittgensteinian Realism References.

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

No understanding of morality has more zealous or influential defenders among academic philosophers than Kant’s. Yet as Michael Rosen demonstrates in The Shadow of God, there is a sense in which Kant’s critics take his conception of freedom more seriously nowadays than his defenders. As a result, contemporary versions of “Kantian ethics” often end up challenging what Rosen calls “the ethics of Kant,” not just the claims of rival moral theories. Rosen supports this surprising conclusion with some powerful arguments, (...) showing that we cannot make sense of Kantian moral philosophy or its extraordinary impact on modern philosophy while detaching it from Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom. But Rosen overstates the continuity between Kant and the Idealist philosophers that he inspired. Thinkers like Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel took Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom far more seriously than defenders of Kantian ethics do today. But precisely because they did so, they felt compelled to address a whole new set of problems, which could be solved only by radically transforming the conception of freedom that they received from Kant. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

To take a structural approach to genealogy means dealing with it as a story written in a language that is unknown and yet to be deciphered. It is the very language of time—individual and familial—in which a human being situates, often in a striking manner, the principal life and death events of his own destiny. Or better perhaps, it means discovering this in genealogies, which must first be exhumed from the dusty cabinets where a solid and excessively documentary (...) tradition has too long confined them, in order to consider them now, in a sense, as venerable “black boxes”, potentially containing secrets of the intimate functioning of families, capable of providing unknown information on this subject, with meaning and logic winning out over the apparent fantasy with which they have been coated. (shrink)

Excerpt from A Companion to Plato's Republic: For English Readers; Being a Commentary Adapted to Davies and Vaughan's Translation The idea of writing a 'Companion to Plato's Republic for English Readers' was suggested to me by the appearance of Mr. Walter Lea's Companion to the Iliad, combined with my own experience of the intense desire for a closer knowledge of Plato, felt by many students who could read him in a translation only. Philosophy loses sorely by translation, but less than (...) poetry; and perhaps a commentator can do more to restore its real meaning. And, indeed, as not all scholars have been trained in philosophy, "I may perhaps hope," to quote Mr. Leaf, 'that even those who have a knowledge of the language may find something to help them' in my work. Whether I have succeeded well or ill, I have at least spared no pains to ascertain and express the real import of Plato's ideas; and this I take to be the true duty of a commentator, especially in dealing with a philosophical genius of the first rank. I ought to say that I have made no attempt at textual criticism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Legal battles continue in the UK over the Government’s plans to transport asylum seekers arriving on British shores to Rwanda in East Africa. Originally announced as a system for ‘processing’ asylum seekers, the Government has subsequently made it clear that there would not be an option for asylum seekers to return to the UK. The arrangement forms part of a deal between the UK and Rwanda, with the UK promising to invest £120 m in economic growth and development in Rwanda, (...) along with financing the cost of the ‘offshored’ asylum operation.1 The Government states that the policy is designed to break the business model of people traffickers involved in facilitating hazardous trips across the Channel in small, overcrowded and unseaworthy craft, leading to multiple drownings. Critics argue that the policy will do nothing to stop desperate people from seeking refuge in the UK, that transferring already traumatised people to Rwanda – which has been criticised for its human rights record – is inhumane and potentially outwith international law. Medical bodies, including the BMA, along with refugee organisations have expressed serious concerns about the health impact of such a system of ‘offshoring’. An equivalent system in Australia has been notorious for the devastating health impacts on those ‘offshored’ to the Pacific islands of Manus and Naura. Unusually in the UK the offshoring proposals have been greeted by unanimous condemnation by the Church of England. The lawfulness of the process is also subject to question. On the 14 July, a plane carrying a small number of asylum seekers to Rwanda was halted shortly before take-off following an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. The ECtHR, part of the Council of Europe, of which the UK is still a member, said an Iraqi man known as KN faced ‘a real …. (shrink)

The book describes a new form of communitarian politics on the African continent, that is able to take seriously both individual entitlements and communitarian obligations. This is achieved by proposing a thin version of communitarianism that realizes the organic relationship between individuals and the community.

Two luminaries of 20th century astrophysics were Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington. Both took seriously the view that there is more to reality than the physical universe and more to consciousness than simply brain activity. In his Science and the Unseen World Eddington speculated about a spiritual world and that "conscious is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense impressions." Jeans also speculated on the existence of a universal mind and a non-mechanical reality, writing (...) in his The Mysterious Universe "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine." In his book QED Feynman discusses the situation of photons being partially transmitted and partially reflected by a sheet of glass: reflection amounting to four percent. In other words one out of every 25 photons will be reflected on average, and this holds true even for a "one at a time" flux. The four percent cannot be explained by statistical differences of the photons nor by random variations in the glass. Something is "telling" every 25th photon on average that it should be reflected back instead of being transmitted. Other quantum experiments lead to similar paradoxes. To explain how a single photon in the two-slit experiment can "know" whether there is one slit or two, Hawking and Mlodonow write: In the double-slit experiment Feynman's ideas mean the particles take paths that thread through the first slit, back out though the second slit, and then through the first again; paths that visit the restaurant that serves that great curried shrimp, and then circle Jupiter a few times before heading home; even paths that go across the universe and back. This, in Feynman's view, explains how the particle acquires the information about which slits are openŠ. It is hard to imagine a more absurd physical explanation. We can think of no way to hardwire the behavior of photons in the glass reflection or the two-slit experiments into a physical law. On the other hand, writing a software algorithm that would yield the desired result is really simple. A digital reality whose laws are software is an idea that has started to gain traction in large part thanks to an influential paper in Philosophical Quarterly by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. Writing in the New York Times John Tierney had this to say: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else's hobby. But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom's, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else's computer simulation. An alternate view is that there exists a great consciousness whose mind is the hardware, and whose thoughts are the software creating a virtual universe in which we as beings of consciousness live. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 592-594 [Access article in PDF] John Earman. Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 217. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $21.95. As his uncompromising title announces, John Earman considers Hume's famous account of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding to be an "abject failure." More than this, the author judges Hume's well-known arguments (...) to have failed in multiple ways. As he states in the opening paragraph: "It is not simply that Hume's [End Page 592] essay does not achieve its goals, but that his goals are ambiguous and confused." Hume's deliberations on this topic, Earman further contends, are unoriginal, and where original, insubstantial. Further, the logic of the position expressed in the essay "reveals the weakness and poverty of Hume's own account of induction and probabilistic reasoning." Finally, "the essay represents the kind of overreaching that gives philosophy a bad name." While there are occasional hints in the book that the author is himself not completely immune to this latter tendency, for the most part these bluntly stated objections to the famous essay are well supported. This book is a comprehensive and persuasive demolition of Hume's much vaunted claims about the credibility of miracle reports, and it issues a serious challenge to standard readings.Hume's Abject Failure is divided into two parts, the first of which takes the form of an analysis and critique of Hume's arguments. This eighty-page section is followed by another hundred pages of primary materials, mostly eighteenth-century, which address issues related to Hume's essay. It is clear from the format of the book that Earman intends to take seriously the intellectual context in which Hume's arguments first appeared. This a most welcome development. Many treatments of Hume's "Of Miracles" tend to be profoundly ahistorical. What becomes immediately apparent from a consideration of this context is the startling unoriginality of Hume's chief argument. The principle that uniform experience overrides testimony to the occurrence of a miracle was aired long before Hume claimed it as his own, although it can be conceded that in Hume's hands it took on a particularly persuasive form.More importantly, however, this is an argument which does not work. Earman claims that Hume would have been aware of this had he availed himself of the developing science of probability, and in particular Thomas Bayes's pioneering attempts to quantify degrees of belief and credibility. Hume's probabilistic arguments, even on the most charitable interpretation, simply fail the test of a Bayesian analysis, and a number of Earman's chapters forcefully demonstrate this. Having exposed the dubious nature of the argument based on competing testimony, Earman goes on to makes good his claim about the inadequacy of Hume's view of induction, showing how it would rule out not merely miracle testimony, but many empirical claims of the kind typically made in the sciences.It is perhaps a little unfair to charge Hume with having articulated a flawed argument the limitations of which only become obvious with the application of a sophisticated calculus unavailable to him. There is no evidence that Hume ever read Bayes. Earman points out that Richard Price, in his 1767 critique of the argument, drew Hume's attention to the possibility of a Bayesian approach, but Hume was apparently reluctant to incorporate quantification into subsequent editions of the Essay. Whether this amounts to a major failing on Hume's part is debatable. It is also worth noting that at times Earman seems to blur the contemporary distinction between "internal" and "external evidences" (miracles were instances of the latter). This distinction is important for understanding why Hume did not adopt the subjective notions of "miracle" of Locke and the Newtonians, and also why in section two of the Essay he deploys the 'contrary miracles' argument. There is also the puzzle as to how so acute a philosophical mind as Hume's could in this instance have... (shrink)

This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which (...) they relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. (shrink)

Même si Simondon, comme l’a bien relevé Jean-Hugues Barthélémy dans Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, souligne le rôle de stabilisateur du transindividuel dévolu à la technique, il n’analyse pas la dimension intrinsèquement technologique du pré-individuel. C’est pourquoi la religion, que Simondon origine pourtant dans la magie, n’est pas pensée depuis sa constitution profondément technique. Or, cette question revient là où Simondon s’avance du côté de la psychanalyse : la critique simondonienne de cette dernière n’a pas clairement (...) formulé l’objection qu’il faut lui adresser, à savoir qu’elle ne pense pas le rôle de la technique dans l’individuation, c’est-à-dire dans le désir.Even if Simondon, as Jean-Hugues Barthélémy well noted in Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, indeed stresses the stabilization part played by the trans-individual granted as it may be to technique, yet the latter never analyzes the intrinsically technological dimension of the pre-individual. That is why religion, which Simondon originates however amid the magical, is no longer thought since its deeply technical constitution. Now such a question goes back to where Simondon moves towards psychoanalysis : the Simondon criticism of the latter never clearly formulated the objection that should be addressed to it, i.e. never taking into thought the part played by technique in individuation, i.e. within desire. (shrink)

Kwame Gyekye seeks to address the complex question of political legitimacy particularly on the African continent. He argues that the justification for political legitimacy need not necessarily depend on the economic performance of any given regime. For him, justification for legitimacy merely lies in whether all correct processes and procedures were properly followed in the assumption of power. He is of the view that military coups should not be tolerated as they lack legitimacy although they might have justification usurping power. (...) He also argues that popular uprisings may have the justification to assume power but should subject themselves to a plebiscite to have legitimacy. In this paper I seek to argue that Gyekye's distinction between legitimacy and justification of exercise of political power is unsustainable. In contrast to Gyekye I seek to argue for a more plausible account of legitimacy that takes the substantive requirement much more seriously. I do this by showing the importance of the function of institutional checks on power in traditional African societies and seek to argue for the urgent need of such institutionalised checks on power in post-colonial Africa. (shrink)

States are in the process of creating controversial legislation aimed at subjecting ‘harmful’ online communication on social media and search engines to new regulatory regimes. Critics argue that these measures are serious threats to the right to freedom of expression and freedom from surveillance. This article first draws on elements of systems theory to reframe the right to freedom of expression in democracy as a means of protecting the value of generalised second-order observation. Taking the UK’s Online Safety bill (...) as the paradigm example of the new laws, the article analyses the concept of harmful communication at three levels: society, organisation, and subject. It identifies a shift in the law’s epistemic approach to communication, by which individuals are reconfigured from agential subjects into contingent users, whose capacities are determined by the structure of online communication platforms. In this configuration, norms previously considered indispensible are relegated to second-order effects of the affordances of media. Arguing that it is insufficient to merely reaffirm subjective rights in light of this shift, the article suggests systems theoretical analysis as a means of identifying lines of critique. (shrink)

Most people take it for granted that it's morally permissible to have children. They may raise questions about the number of children it's responsible to have or whether it's permissible to reproduce when there's a strong risk of serious disability. But in general, having children is considered a good thing to do, something that's morally permissible in most cases (perhaps even obligatory).

We recast parts of decision theory in terms of channel theory concentrating on qualitative issues. Channel theory allows one to move between model theoretic and language theoretic notions as is necessary for an adequate covering. Doing so clarifies decision theory and presents the opportunity to investigate alternative formulations. As an example, we take some of Savage’s notions of decision theory and recast them within channel theory. In place of probabilities, we use a particular logic of preference. We introduce a (...) logic for describing actions separate from the logic of preference over actions. The structures introduced by channel theory that represent the decision problems can be seen to be an abstract framework. This frame-work is very accommodating to changing the nature of the decision problems to handle different aspects or theories about decision making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 299-301 [Access article in PDF] Reading Minkowski with Husserl Bernard Pachoud Eugene Minkowski is generally regarded as one of the main figures of the phenomenological strand of psychiatry in France. However, it is striking that, as a phenomenologist, he very rarely mentions Husserl or Heidegger in his texts. Nor, for that matter, does he use their concepts or rely on their descriptions (...) (except in a few texts entirely devoted to the presentation of the philosophical roots of phenomenology). Actually, the philosopher he most often refers to, and whose concepts he borrows, is Bergson, who is not a phenomenologist. But although Minkowski's framework is not phenomenological in the philosophical sense of the term, his clinical descriptions are certainly based on a genuinely phenomenological approach—in the sense that they deal with the subjective experience of patients and the way in which their experience determines their behavior. It is all the more striking to notice just how much his descriptions of abnormal experiences echo certain Husserlian studies that he seems to ignore. I will focus on some common points between Minkowski's clinical descriptions and Husserlian studies that Minkowski could not, in fact, have known at the time of writing this article (at least in their complete form, since they were developed after 1923).The present text, "A Contribution to the Study of Autism: The Interrogative Attitude," is a typical example of Minkowski's clinical descriptions and theoretical interests. The interrogative attitude of the patient Paul C. is considered by Minkowski to be one of the "schizophrenic attitudes," expressing what he calls "loss of contact with reality," a phenomenon held to be characteristic of schizophrenia. These attitudes are quite simply the modalities of schizophrenic "autism" in Bleuler's sense of the latter term. Minkowski (1925) distinguishes the attitudes of withdrawal that have an affective coloring (morbid daydreaming, sulking, and regrets) from those that are purely intellectual (morbid rationalism, the interrogative attitude, the morbid hypertrophy of geometric and static factors). What gives a pathological cast to Paul C.'s systematically interrogative attitude is that it expresses (following Minkowski's clinical description) the patient's inability to engage in action or to establish any practical relationship with reality. This interrogative attitude can be considered a way to take some initiative and thereby avoid complete passivity, but it is a deficient mode of "position taking" since there is no engagement in real action.This emphasis on disorder of action has a modern sound, for it echoes theoretical hypotheses regarding schizophrenia developed by contemporary neuroscientists (Frith 1992). It also echoes the Husserlian studies of perception, in which the feeling of reality largely depends on the strong connection between perception and voluntary movement (action), kinesthetic sensations playing here a key role (Husserl 1989). There are also some remarkable convergences [End Page 299] with Husserl's studies of the active and passive dimensions of consciousness, to be considered next. Husserl's Studies of the Activity and Passivity of Consciousness The main claim of transcendental phenomenology is that our experience completely depends on what Husserl calls the synthetic activity of consciousness. Everything that we become aware of is constituted by the activity of the mind. In texts written between 1918 and 1926 and gathered together under the title, "Analysis of Passive Synthesis," Husserl (1966) distinguishes different degrees of the activity of consciousness, depending on whether or not the ego has the initiative. Mainly, two kinds of activity are described, one depending on the subject (the ego) and requiring his initiative, the other occurring, so to say, in an anonymous, automatic way, elicited by the object, and labeled for this reason "passive synthesis." In other words, when experience relies on synthetic activity, Husserl distinguishes synthetic acts initiated by the ego (the genuine acts) from those that occur in consciousness in an automatic, passive way. Accordingly, the activity of consciousness turns out never to be a pure activity; it always occurs against a background of passivity. Most often, the act is a response to prior stimulation given passively, and it is through this act that the "I" discovers itself as a... (shrink)

The title of this paper makes an obvious reference to Pippin’s book Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part presents Pippin’s conception of Modernity, why it is a philosophical problem, and how two philosophers have responded to it, namely, Kant and Hegel whose position in an attenuated manner Pippin supports. The second part evokes dimensions of Merleau-Ponty’s thought which contest Pippin’s Hegelianism. The third part of the paper offers a different conception of (...) Modernity drawn from the work of Claude Lefort. Lefort’s understanding of Modernity avails itself of aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, in particular: Hyper-reflection and Institution. (shrink)

Augustine's dialogue De libero arbitrio is, with his Confessions and City of God, one of his most important and widely read works. It contains one of the earliest accounts of the concept of 'free will' in the history of philosophy. Composed during a key period in Augustine's early career, between his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as a bishop, it has often been viewed as a an incoherent mixture of his 'early' and 'late' thinking. Simon Harrison offers an original (...) account of Augustine's theory of will, taking seriously both the philosophical arguments and literary form of the text. Relating De libero arbitrio to other key texts of Augustine's, in particular the City of God and the Confessions, Harrison shows that Augustine approaches the problem of free will as a problem of knowledge: how do I know that I am free?, and that Augustine uses the dialogue form to instantiate his 'way into the will'. (shrink)

The paper uses thompson clark's theory of the relation of perceptual parts and wholes to illuminate certain aspects of our knowledge of other minds. The thesis is that the traditional problem can be usefully broken down into two parts--One of which calls for a better understanding of the logic of perceptual concepts; the other, For a closer look at what happens when we try to take the epistemological skeptic seriously.

In ‘On Denoting’ and to some extent in ‘Review of Meinong and Others, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie’, published in the same issue of Mind (Russell, 1905a,b), Russell presents not only his famous elimination (or contextual defi nition) of defi nite descriptions, but also a series of considerations against understanding defi nite descriptions as singular terms. At the end of ‘On Denoting’, Russell believes he has shown that all the theories that do treat defi nite descriptions as singular terms fall (...) logically short: Meinong’s, Mally’s, his own earlier (1903) theory, and Frege’s. (He also believes that at least some of them fall short on other grounds—epistemological and metaphysical—but we do not discuss these criticisms except in passing). Our aim in the present paper is to discuss whether his criticisms actually refute Frege’s theory. We fi rst attempt to specify just what Frege’s theory is and present the evidence that has moved scholars to attribute one of three different theories to Frege in this area. We think that each of these theories has some claim to be Fregean, even though they are logically quite different from each other. This raises the issue of determining Frege’s attitude towards these three theories. We consider whether he changed his mind and came to replace one theory with another, or whether he perhaps thought that the different theories applied to different realms, for example, to natural language versus a language for formal logic and arithmetic. We do not come to any hard and fast conclusion here, but instead just note that all these theories treat defi nite descriptions as singular terms, and that Russell proceeds as if he has refuted them all. After taking a brief look at the formal properties of the Fregean theories (particularly the logical status of various sentences containing nonproper defi - nite descriptions) and comparing them to Russell’s theory in this regard, we turn to Russell’s actual criticisms in the above-mentioned articles to examine the extent to which the criticisms hold.. (shrink)

Même si Simondon, comme l'a bien relevé Jean-Hugues Barthélémy dans Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, souligne le rôle de stabilisateur du transindividuel devolu à la technique, il n'analyse pas la dimension intrinsèquement technologique du pré-individuel. C'est pourquoi la religion, que Simondon origine pourtant dans la magie, n'est pas pensée depuis sa constitution profondément technique. Or, cette question revient la où Simondon s'avance du côté de la psychanalyse : la critique simondonienne de cette dernière n'a pas clairement (...) formulé l'objection qu'il faut lui adresser, à savoir qu'elle ne pense pas le role de la technique dans l'individuation, c'est-a-dire dans le désir. Even if Simondon, as Jean-Hugues Barthelemy well noted in Penser la connaissance et la technique apres Simondon (« How one may think knowledge and technique after Simondon » ) , indeed stresses the stabilization part played by the trans-individual granted as it may be to technique, yet the latter never analyzes the intrinsically technological dimension of the pre-individual. That is why religion, which Simondon originates however amid the magical, is no longer thought since its deeply technical constitution. Now such a question goes back to where Simondon moves towards psychoanalysis : the Simondon criticism of the latter never clearly formulated the objection that should be addressed to it, i. e. never taking into thought the part played by technique in individuation, i. e. within desire. (shrink)

Deleuze seeks to pry philosophy from the hands of those who would, grounding their judgments in a supposedly transcendent reality, distort or fail to recognize the true nature of things in the changing world. This task for a philosophy of the future, intended to project us beyond such moral categories as "good" and "evil" in favour of the alternative ethical categories, "good" and "bad", is to be achieved, Deleuze thinks, by overturning Platonism. Plato's doctrine of the forms is held by (...) Deleuze to be an example of the corruption of metaphysics by the will to judge, characteristic of Christian morality (whose origins in Platonic philosophy are undeniable). For Deleuze, the philosopher is primarily a producer of concepts, not an agent who generates through judgment. Chapter One sets the agenda for the thesis by opening questions about what is good for the human agent, specifically in terms of the relation between an agent and the products s/he might produce. A brief account is given of Deleuze's position on goodness, offered in the light of his criticisms of the Platonic tradition. Questions are raised about what measures Deleuze takes to avoid transcendence, and about what consequences might follow from this move. Chapter Two attempts to rescue Plato from some of Deleuze's more serious charges, and does so by considering Plato's concept of the Good in relation to his accounts of measure and of the chora, a concept of place. Contemporary Plato scholarship is used to show questionable presuppositions in Deleuze's account of Plato, for instance regarding the physics of the Platonic universe, the status of transcendence, and the nature of the eidos, or form. Chapter Three examines Deleuze's own metaphysics of Difference, Multiplicity and Event, in relation to traditional atomism, the philosophy of time (duration) of Henri Bergson, and certain alternative theories of event. The relation of event and action is explored in the context of naming and intention. Chapter Four presents Deleuze's theory of the Event as a theory of the Void, in relation to Deleuze's monism, and to time, goodness, and negativity. The relation between Deleuze's theory of the Event and his Ethics is further developed, in order to open questions about the motivation for and nature of action in Deleuzian philosophy. Chapter Five synthesizes the various themes, and contrasts Deleuze with Plato on the question of the good for the agent, love, and action, all in relation to Deleuze's Stoicism. (shrink)

I examine recent work on moral dilemmas and argue that there are no moral dilemmas which issue in inescapable wrongdoing . In the first three chapters I examine some important arguments for and against tragic dilemmas---arguments from deontic logic, Martha Nussbaum's view that vulnerability is essential to human values, Bernard Williams' argument from guilt , and the argument from the fragmentation of value---and show that these arguments for and against are inconclusive. ;In Chapter 4 I attempt to provide a (...) reason to reject tragic dilemmas which will have force for those most inclined to accept dilemmas---those, such as Williams and Nussbaum, who are engaged in a critique of modern moral philosophy. Central to their critique is their denial of the distinction between moral and nonmoral reasons and of the primacy of the moral. I show that an account of practical deliberation which can accommodate the possibility of tragic dilemmas has the effect, not of undermining the distinction between moral and nonmoral reasons and the primacy of the moral, but of strengthening that distinction and that primacy. This is because a picture of practical deliberation which can accommodate the possibility of tragic dilemmas makes moral reasons distinct from nonmoral reasons in how they achieve their deliberative weight. ;In Chapter 5 I present an alternative picture of practical deliberation which I commend to these critics. In my alternative picture, moral reasons have deliberative weight for an agent for the same reason nonmoral reasons do: because the agent sees things from a point of view from which such reasons are important. My picture takes seriously the critics' view that moral value is continuous with other sorts of value and is not overriding and supremely regulative; but my picture does not accommodate the possibility of tragic dilemmas. I conclude that their project of criticizing modern moral philosophy is better served by accepting my picture and thus rejecting the possibility of tragic dilemmas. (shrink)

Bernard Harrison; XIII—Meaning and Mental Images, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 237–250, https://doi.org/10.10.

This paper argues that, to tackle the issue of sustainability, we should pay more attention to the temporality of socioecological processes. Only thus can we better understand current subjective and institutional constraints, as well as envision new potential pathways for transformative change. Two main arguments are developed: (1) there is a uniqueness in the temporality of Earth system processes associated with planetary boundaries that deeply transforms our time horizon and the pace of change, and (2) this situation creates a disruption (...) of the temporality embodied in dominant sociopolitical conventions such as the institutional definition and operationalisation of sustainable development. New research avenues and time policies are suggested towards responding meaningfully to the alarming current socioenvironmental trends. (shrink)

What makes us responsive, however occasionally, to moral demands? Why do people sometimes own up, go off to fight unwillingly in what they consider to be just wars, refrain from stealing a march on friends, and so on, even when they could by doing otherwise reap advantages far outweighing, in the scales of ordinary prudential rationality, any consequent disadvantage? Why has morality such a hold over us?

Among the miscellany of philosophical achievements bequeathed us by the Enlightenment is the account, worked out by Hobbes, Locke, Hume and others, of the conditions for the existence of the kind of civil or commercial association that depends upon contract. The theory of civil association has subsequently exercised the kind of fascination for moral philosophers that a highly successful theory is apt to exercise in any field of enquiry: it has, that is, both inspired later writers and to some extent (...) restricted their horizons. (shrink)

In our recent article, "Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective" we commented on a fundamental notion in current approaches to cultural evolution, the “zones of latent solutions”, and proposed a modification of it, namely a social and dynamic interpretation of the latent solutions which were originally introduced within an individualistic framework and as static, genetically fixed entities. This modification seemed, and still seems, relevant to us and, in particular, more adequate for coping with the (...) archaeological record. Bandini et al. rejected our proposition and deemed it unnecessary. In their critique, they focused on: our reservations about an individualistic approach; our objections to the presumption of fully naive individuals; and our demand for an extended consideration of forms of social learning simpler than emulation and imitation. We will briefly reply to their critique in order to clarify some misunderstandings. However, the criticisms also show that we are at an impasse on certain crucial topics, such as the meaning of ZLS and the scope and nature of culture in general. Thus, we consider it necessary to make an additional effort to identify the conceptual roots which are at the very basis of the dissent with Bandini et al. (shrink)

Written by a non-Jewish analytic philosopher, this book addresses the issue of whether, and to what extent, current opposition to Israel on the liberal-left embodies anti-Semitic stances. It argues that the dominant climate of liberal opinion disseminates, however inadvertently, a range of anti-Semitic assertions and motifs of the most traditional kind. It advocates a return to an unrestricted anti-racism which would allow liberals to defend Palestinian interests without demonizing Jews.