Andrew Fitz-Gibbon in Pragmatic Nonviolence: Working Toward a Better World argues that a principled form of pragmatism—pragmatism shaped by the theory of nonviolence—is the best hope for our world. He defines nonviolence as “a practice that, whenever possible seeks the well-being of the Other, by refusing to use violence to solve problems, and by having an intentional commitment to lovingkindness.” In the first part of the book, Fitz-Gibbon asks what a better world would look like. In the second part, (...) he covers what is the greatest obstacle to that better world: violence. In the third part, he examines philosophical theories of nonviolence. The fourth part examines pragmatism as a philosophy of “what works” (William James) through the lens of the principle of maximizing well-being through nonviolent practice. In response to Fitz-Gibbon’s work, critic Danielle Poe asks what a nonviolence response looks like to the Other whom we have wronged and wonders how nonviolence responds to systemic violence. Sanjay Lal asks whether pragmatism and nonviolence can be synthesized given the popular conception that the pragmatic possible seems at odds with the ideal of absolute nonviolence. William C. Gay affirms much of the text and suggests its uses in teaching. Mechthild Nagel wonders if Fitz-Gibbon’s pragmatic nonviolence is too anthropocentric and questions the absence of a consideration of systemic violence in the criminal justice system. Fitz-Gibbon then responds to the critics. (shrink)

Review Essay: New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics , eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Applying ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory, this book historicizes psychoanalysis through a new and significant theorization of the Gothic. The central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.

Although death statutes permitting physicians to declare brain death are relatively uniform throughout the United States, academic debate persists over the equivalency of human death and brain death. Alan Shewmon showed that the formerly accepted integration rationale was conceptually incomplete by showing that brain-dead patients demonstrated a degree of integration. We provide a more complete rationale for the equivalency of human death and brain death by defending a deeper understanding of the organism as a whole and by using a novel (...) strategy with shared objectives to justify death determination criteria. Our OaaW account describes different types of OaaW, defining human death as the loss of status as a human OaaW. We defend human death as similar to nonhuman death in terms of wakefulness, but also distinct in terms of the sui generis properties, particularly conscious awareness. We thereby defend the equivalency of brain death and human death using a resulting neurocentric rationale. (shrink)

Clicks, comments, transactions, and physical movements are being increasingly recorded and analyzed by Big Data processors who use this information to trace the sentiment and activities of markets and voters. While the benefits of Big Data have received considerable attention, it is the potential social costs of practices associated with Big Data that are of interest to us in this paper. Prior research has investigated the impact of Big Data on individual privacy rights, however, there is also growing recognition of (...) its capacity to be mobilized for surveillance purposes. Our paper delineates the underlying issues of privacy and surveillance and presents them as in tension with one another. We postulate that efforts at controlling Big Data may create a trade-off of risks rather than an overall improvement in data protection. We explore this idea in relation to the principles of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as it arguably embodies the new ‘gold standard’ of cyber-laws. We posit that safeguards advocated by the law, anonymization and pseudonymization, while representing effective counter measures to privacy concerns, also incentivize the use, collection, and trade of behavioral and other forms of de-identified data. We consider the legal status of these ownerless forms of data, arguing that data protection techniques such as anonymization and pseudonymization raise significant concerns over the ownership of behavioral data and its potential use in the large-scale modification of activities and choices made both on and offline. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn his account of public reason Rawls assumes that some facts ought to be treated as ‘fixed’, or beyond reasonable disagreement. These include, for him, facts upon which there is a scientif...

Pleasure is one of the most obvious candidates for directly improving wellbeing. Hedonists claim it is the only feature that can intrinsically make life better for the one living it, and that all of wellbeing derives from the relative pleasantness and unpleasantness of conscious experience. But Hedonism is incompatible with the ‘heterogeneity’ of pleasure: it cannot allow that distinct pleasures can feel completely differently, if experiences count as pleasant due to how they feel. I argue that a pluralistic variant of (...) Hedonism can match its theoretical attractions while also accommodating the heterogeneity of pleasure. This has interesting implications for both the philosophical debate over the nature of wellbeing and psychological theories of how to measure and aggregate positive affect. In particular, my argument implies that there is no single dimension of ‘valence’ or ‘intensity’ on which pleasantness can be measured. (shrink)

Rigby (Center for the Study of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Coventry U., England) investigates different approaches to "policing" the past, from mass purges ...

The epistemic regress problem is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on evidence. The problem of the criterion is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on general standards for distinguishing what is true from what is false. These problems are similar. Each is constituted by a set of propositions about epistemically valuable relational properties—being supported by evidence and being authorized by a criterion of truth—that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent, a paradox. The propositions (...) that constitute one problem have the same forms as the propositions that constitute the other. In particular, each problem turns on the claim that a belief can have a valuable relational property only by means of an endless regress and that this requirement cannot be satisfied. Finally, since evidence and criteria are kinds of reasons, each problem is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on reasons. (shrink)

This innovative collection offers one of the first analyses of criminologies of the military from an interdisciplinary perspective. While some criminologists have examined the military in relation to the area of war crimes, this collection considers a range of other important but less explored aspects such as private military actors, insurgents, paramilitary groups and the role of military forces in tackling transnational crime. Drawing upon insights from criminology, this book's editors also consider the ways the military institution harbours criminal activity (...) within its ranks and deals with prisoners of war. The contributions, by leading experts in the field, have a broad reach and take a truly global approach to the subject. (shrink)

"Resilience in the academic setting has been named as academic resilience and been defined as an increased probability of academic success despite stressful events and conditions" [Mitchell, 2021] p1474 based on the Academic Resilience Scale (ARS‐30) [Cassidy, 2016].

An overview of current issues in musical ontology, including debates about "fundamental" vs. "higher-order" musical ontology and skepticism about both kinds.

I ARGUE IN THIS PAPER that there are profound and legitimate worries concerning the application of organic and personal criteria to groups. I try to specify the reasons why we object to such ideas, while contending that some of these objections are misguided. Primarily, to refer to a group as a person is not necessarily the same as referring to it as either organic or as an individual. Further, each term--organic, individual, and person--must be carefully unpacked and analyzed. One conclusion (...) of this analysis is that there are important senses in which these concepts both overlap and also diverge. One should not therefore automatically conflate them. Another conclusion is that there are senses of these terms which are perfectly innocuous. Finally, there are clearly ways in which we can sensibly use the notion of personality to apply to groups. The groups in question are usually diverse, and do not have to include the state. In fact, despite the absence of such "group person" usage from mainstream political theory, such language is more of a commonplace in international politics and legal discourse and practice. I attempt, in the final part of the paper, to schematize the various uses of personality. I conclude by suggesting the fruitfulness of one particular sense of juristic personality. (shrink)

Key Philosophers in Conversation is a fascinating collection of interviews presenting the ideas of some of the worlds leading contemporary philosophers. Each interview features a discussion with a key philosopher looking at philosophical issues such as; the philosophy of mind, ethics, science, political philosophy and the history of philosophy. Those interviewed are; W.V.O Quine, Michael Dummet, Mary Warnock, Hilary Putnam, Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, Roger Scruton, Bernard Williams, Jean Hampton, Richard Dawkins, Derek Parfit, Peter Strawson, David Gauthier, Hugh (...) Mellor, John Cottingham, Adam Morton, Stefan Korner, Richard Sorabji and Nancy Cartwright. This book offers an excellent insight to contemporary philosophy and is ideal for anyone seeking an introduction to what is happening in Philosophy today. (shrink)

A solution to the Liar must do two things. First, it should say exactly which step in the Liar reasoning - the reasoning which leads to a contradiction - is invalid. Secondly, it should explains why this step is invalid.

Dunn has recently argued that the logic R-Mingle (or RM) is a good, and good enough, choice for many purposes in relevant and paraconsistent logic. This includes an argument that the validity of Safety principle, according to which one may infer an arbitrary instance of the law of excluded middle from an arbitrary contradiction, in RM is not a problem because it doesn’t allow one to infer anything new from a contradiction. In this paper, I argue that while Dunn’s claim (...) holds for the logic, there is a good reason to think that it’s not the case for (prime) theories closed under the logic, and that this should give relevantists, and some paraconsistentists, pause when considering whether RM is adequate for their purposes. (shrink)

Gallagher poses a phenomenologically-inspired challenge to a classical metaphysics of nature which is associated with contemporary natural sciences. This metaphysics can be reconstructed in terms of two distinct commitments: reductionism and individualism. This comment on Gallagher’s [2019] article attempts to show how a revision of the classical metaphysics can be made intelligible in light of those two commitments. It requires a strong interpretation of the ecological framework for understanding cognition. Such a revision would give agency a central place in the (...) revised metaphysics of nature. (shrink)

We claim that the meaning of the adverbial almost contains both a scalar proximity measure and a modal that allows it to work sometimes when proximity fails, what we call the at-a-distance reading. Essentially, almost can hold if the proposition follows from the normal uninterrupted outcomes of adding a small enough number of premises to a selection of relevant facts. Almost at-a-distance is blocked when the temporal properties of the topic time and Davidsonian event prevent normal outcomes from coming true (...) when they need to. This approach to almost differs from the two general approaches that have emerged in the literature, by replacing the negative polar condition with a positive antecedent condition that entails not p while avoiding the numerous well-documented complications of employing a polar condition. Since this approach to almost involves a circumstantial base with a non-interrupting ordering source, almost behaves in certain ways like the progressive, and shows contextual variability of the same kinds that we see with premise sets. (shrink)

The second volume of this comprehensive anthology covers the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The anthology is broad ranging both in its selection of material by figures traditionally acknowledged as being of central importance, and in the material it presents by a range of other figures. The material in this volume is presented in three sections. The first, “Power and the State,” includes selections by such figures as Goldman, Lenin, Weber, Schmitt, and Hayek. Among those included in the “Race, Gender, (...) and Colonialism” section are de Beauvoir, Gandhi, Fanon, and Young. The third and by far the longest section, “Rights-Based Liberalism and its Critics,” focuses on the many interrelated directions that social and political philosophy has taken since the publication of John Rawls’s ground-breaking _A Theory of Justice_ in 1971. In order to better meet the needs of today’s students, the editors have made every effort to include accurate and accessible translations of the readings. Additionally, every selection has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting her or his major contributions within the tradition. For figures of central importance, the editors have included extended introductions that place the figure in the context of intellectual history as well as of political thought. In order to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and accessibility, the editors have consulted dozens of leading academics during the course of the volume’s development. The result is an anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits; _The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought_ sets the new standard for social and political philosophy instruction. (shrink)

Davidson’s error theory about metaphorical meaning has rightly commanded a lot of critical attention over the last twenty five or so years. Each component of that theory – the case for antirealism about metaphorical meanings, the diagnosis of the mistakes that led theorists to falsely ascribe such semantic properties to words and sentences, the suggested functional replacement of such talk in terms of the effects that metaphorical utterances bring about – has been examined, reformulated and criticised. The evaluation of the (...) theory has been far from uniformly negative. It is widely recognized, even by realists about metaphorical meaning, that the ‘conventional wisdom’ about ‘discerning two senses of the predicate term’ that Beardsley had adverted to three years earlier, was shown to be misguided by the considerations that Davidson’s paper brought to bear.[1] Contemporary recognition of the importance of elucidating the dependence of metaphorical language upon its literal base, and upon its context of utterance, can also be seen to have resulted from sustained critical engagement with Davidson’s article. (shrink)

A solution to the paradoxes has two sides: the philosophical and the technical. The paradoxes are, first and foremost, a philosophical problem. A philosophical solution must pinpoint the exact step where the reasoning that leads to contradiction is fallacious, and then explain why it is so.

Atheism: young Hegelian style -- A social thing -- The tenacity of an illusion -- Beyond God and evil -- The liberal turn -- A precarious left.

Abstract In this paper I examine two claims that support the thesis that chimpanzees are substantive epistemic subjects. First, I defend the claim that chimpanzees are evidence gatherers (broadly construed to include the capacity to gather and use evidence). In the course of showing that this claim is probably true I will also show that, in being evidence gatherers, chimpanzees engage in a recognizable epistemic activity. Second, I defend the claim that chimpanzees achieve a degree of epistemic success while engaging (...) in epistemic activity. Typically humans qualify as substantive epistemic subjects. Again, typically, knowledge plays an integral role in intentional human behaviour. As a consequence of defending the claims that chimpanzees are evidence gatherers and achieve a degree of epistemic success while engaging in such epistemic activities, I will also have shown how knowledge plays an integral role in intentional chimpanzee behaviour. The importance of these arguments does not wholly reside in the significance of knowledge explaining some chimpanzee behaviour. Treatments of animal knowledge in the literature tend to go in one of two directions: either the treatment embraces reliabilism and so construes animal knowledge as reliably produced true beliefs (or, if not beliefs, the relevant analogue for non-linguistic animals), or it embraces an anthropocentric stance that treats animals as knowers only when they find themselves behaving in circumstances that, were it true of humans, would imply the presence of causally efficacious knowledge. What I offer here is another way of understanding non-linguistic animals, in this case chimpanzees, as knowers. (shrink)

Previous critics have argued that Robert McCauley defines religion and science selectively and arbitrarily, cutting them to fit his model in Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. McCauley has responded that final definitions are “overrated” and that artificial distinctions can serve an important role in naturalistic investigation. I agree with this position but argue that a genealogy of the category of religion is crucial to the methodology that McCauley describes. Since the inherent ambiguity of religion will undermine any (...) essential claims about its cognitive naturalness, I invite McCauley to consider how his research might investigate scientific and religious cognition in new terms. (shrink)

This book, the first to explore religious education and post-modernity in depth, sets out to provide a much needed examination of the problems and possibilities post-modernity raises for religious education.