A benchmark question in contemporary food regimes scholarship is how to theorize agriculture’s incorporation into the WTO. For the most part, it has been theorized as an institutional mechanism that facilitates the ushering in of a new, so-called ‘third food regime’, in which food–society relations are governed by the overarching politics of the market. The collapse of the Doha Round negotiations in July 2008 makes it possible, for the first time, to offer a conclusive assessment as to whether this is (...) the case. Using a broadly conceived world-historical framework, this article contends that the WTO is more appropriately theorized as a carryover from the politics of the crisis of the second food regime, rather than representing any putative successor. The Doha Round’s collapse in Geneva in July 2008 should put an end to speculation of a WTO-led transformation of global food politics towards unfettered market rule; the supposed basis for a neo-liberalized ‘third food regime’. Consequently, it is through analysis of the factors that framed the Doha Round’s collapse, rather than in the WTO itself, that provide insights into the defining elements of a new global politics of food. (shrink)

This article contributes to emergent scholarship that questions neoliberal discourses in agricultural policy, through a case study that challenges assumptions about the role of “the market” in explaining the recent expansion of Australian beef exports. Australia is the world’s largest beef exporter and its beef exports more than doubled between the mid-1980s and the turn of the 21st century. This expansion, however, can be explained through a particular conjunction of political conditions, which are unlikely to be repeated with equal force (...) in the current decade. Specifically, recent growth hinged upon a combination of (1) rapid growth of Japanese and Korean beef consumption in the early 1990s; (2) the operation of the US “cattle cycle” in the mid-1990s; and (3) the privileged position of Australian beef during this period, vis-à-vis Latin American competition, because of concerns over foot and mouth disease. However, because of their adherence to neoliberal assumptions about the supposed inevitability of trade liberalization, agricultural economists have mistaken these specific circumstances for a general condition in which Australian beef exports will continue growing. This deceptive envisaging of the bounty from liberalization leads not only to false expectations among industry participants, but encourages politics in which industry growth is fallaciously prioritized. (shrink)

Epistemic Angst offers a completely new solution to the ancient philosophical problem of radical skepticism—the challenge of explaining how it is possible to have knowledge of a world external to us. Duncan Pritchard argues that the key to resolving this puzzle is to realize that it is composed of two logically distinct problems, each requiring its own solution. He then puts forward solutions to both problems. To that end, he offers a new reading of Wittgenstein's account of the structure (...) of rational evaluation and demonstrates how this provides an elegant solution to one aspect of the skeptical problem. Pritchard also revisits the epistemological disjunctivist proposal that he developed in previous work and shows how it can effectively handle the other aspect of the problem. Finally, he argues that these two antiskeptical positions, while superficially in tension with each other, are not only compatible but also mutually supporting. The result is a comprehensive and distinctive resolution to the problem of radical skepticism, one that challenges many assumptions in contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

A conspicuous oversight in recent debates about the vexed problem of the value of knowledge has been the value of knowledge-how. This would not be surprising if knowledge-how were, as Gilbert Ryle [1945, 1949] famously thought, fundamentally different from knowledge-that. However, reductive intellectualists [e.g. Stanley and Williamson 2001; Brogaard 2008, 2009, 2011; Stanley 2011a, 2011b] maintain that knowledge-how just is a kind of knowledge-that. Accordingly, reductive intellectualists must predict that the value problems facing propositional knowledge will equally apply to knowledge-how. (...) We show, however, that this is not the case. Accordingly, we highlight a value-driven argument for thinking that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart. (shrink)

Both an ideal entrée for beginning readers and a solid text for scholars, the second edition of Peter Kalkavage's acclaimed translation of Plato's _Timaeus_ brings enhanced accessibility to a rendering well known for its faithfulness to the original text. An extensive essay offers insights into the reading of the work, the nature of Platonic dialogue, and the cultural background of the _Timaeus_. Appendices on music, astronomy, and geometry provide additional guidance. A brief outline of the themes of the work, a (...) detailed glossary, and a selected bibliography are also included. (shrink)

The themes of the book—the value of knowledge and epistemic appraisal broadly conceived—are introduced in this chapter. The Meno problem is explained and related to the swamping problem as discussed by Jonathan Kvanvig. The stance of virtue epistemologists is outlined. This is followed by a brief discussion of the role of truth in epistemic appraisal. The remainder of the introduction summarises the contributions to the book.

In this paper, I discuss a distinctively non-paradigmatic instance of punishment: the punishment of non-citizens. I shall argue that the punishment of non-citizens presents considerable difficulties for one currently popular account of criminal punishment: Antony Duff’s communicative expressive theory of punishment. Duff presents his theory explicitly as an account of the punishment of citizens - and as I shall argue, this is not merely an incidental feature of his account. However, it is plausible that a general account of the criminal (...) law of the kind of idealized state that Duff focusses on will need to say something about how that law deals with non-citizens. In particular, I claim, it will need to provide a justification for punishing them. Because Duff's account says nothing about the punishment of non-citizens, it cannot do so. Furthermore, although Duff's more recent suggestion that non-citizens should be thought of as being guests in the state on whose territory they are present may provide for an account of their criminalization, it cannot easily be extended into an account that provides a justification for their punishment. (shrink)

The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as (...) justification or understanding, are distinctively valuable. We will call the general question of why knowledge is valuable the value problem. (shrink)

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across (...) inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. (shrink)

According to robust virtue epistemology, knowledge is a cognitive achievement, where this means that the agent's cognitive success is because of her cognitive ability. One type of objection to robust virtue epistemology that has been put forward in the contemporary literature is that this view has problems dealing with certain kinds of testimonial knowledge, and thus that it is in tension with standard views in the epistemology of testimony. We build on this critique to argue that insofar as agents epistemically (...) depend on third‐party members of their epistemic community as many social epistemologists contend, then there will be cases where two agents differ epistemically despite being virtue‐theoretic duplicates. This means that robust virtue epistemology, at least insofar as it is understood along standard lines such that it endorses epistemic individualism, is also in tension with a central commitment of contemporary social epistemology. (shrink)

Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, is at the core of many of the central debates and issues in philosophy, interrogating the notions of truth, objectivity, trust, belief and perception. _The Routledge Companion to Epistemology_ provides a comprehensive and the up-to-date survey of epistemology, charting its history, providing a thorough account of its key thinkers and movements, and addressing enduring questions and contemporary research in the field. Organized thematically, the _Companion_ is divided into ten sections: Foundational Issues, The Analysis of Knowledge, (...) The Structure of Knowledge, Kinds of Knowledge, Skepticism, Responses to Skepticism, Knowledge and Knowledge Attributions, Formal Epistemology, The History of Epistemology, and Metaepistemological Issues. Seventy-eight chapters, each between 5000 and 7000 words and written by the world’s leading epistemologists, provide students with an outstanding and accessible guide to the field. Designed to fit the most comprehensive syllabus in the discipline, this text will be an indispensible resource for anyone interested in this central area of philosophy. _The Routledge Companion to Epistemology_ is essential reading for students of philosophy. (shrink)

The vicissitudes of the concept of original choice illustrate the change, and yet the continuity, of Sartre's existentialist thought as he gradually changed the focus of his attentions from psychological to sociological aspects of "the human condition." The relationship of the doctrine to Sartre's own "existential psychoanalysis" is described. The point at which Sartre explicitly repudiated the earlier doctrine of original choice and the general characteristics of his revised doctrine are explicated. In general, Sartre's current position is that the goal- (...) directed structure of human endeavor is a freely-created variation upon the conditioning imposed by society, aiming at liberation from such external determinism. Sartre continues to reject the notion of a causal determinism, psychological or social, which makes the person a product—a "thing"—and which reduces human freedom to the status of illusion. (shrink)

Ambivalence—where we experience two conflicting emotional responses to the same object, person or state of affairs—is sometimes thought to pose a problem for cognitive theories of emotion. Drawing on the ideas of the Stoic Chrysippus, I argue that a cognitivist can account for ambivalence without retreating from the view that emotions involve fully-fledged evaluative judgments. It is central to the account I offer that emotions involve two kinds of judgment: one about the object of emotion, and one about the subject's (...) response. (shrink)

These fifteen original essays address the core semantic concepts of reference and referring from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives. After an introductory essay that casts current trends in reference and referring in terms of an ongoing dialogue between Fregean and Russellian approaches, the book addresses specific topics, balancing breadth of coverage with thematic unity. The contributors, all leading or emerging scholars, address trenchant neo-Fregean challenges to the direct reference position; consider what positive claims can be made about the mechanism of (...) reference; address the role of a theory of reference within broader theoretical context; and investigate other kinds of linguistic expressions used in referring activities that may themselves be referring expressions. The topical unity and accessibility of the essays, the stage-setting introductory essay, and the comprehensive index combine to make R _eference and Referring_, along with the other books in the Topics in Contemporary Philosophy series, appropriate for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. -/- I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it (...) helps to answer a challenge often put to Those who argue for the existence of collective obligations: namely, to explain why the question of whether there are any such obligations might matter from a practical point of view. One way of introducing the objection is to focus on questions of agency. Here I'll argue both that there can be obligations on groups that are not themselves collective agents, and that these can play an important explanatory and clarifcatory role in accounting for obligations which fall on individuals. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

I shall argue that advocates of denunciatory forms of expressivism can make a good case for restricting the range of measures that can be an appropriate form of punishment. They can do so by focusing not on the conditions of uptake of the message conveyed by punishment, but by the content of that message. For it is plausible that part of that message should be that the offender is a responsible agent and a member of the political community. Forms of (...) punishment which do not treat the offender as such are, for that reason unacceptable. Among the forms of punishment which are thereby ruled out are the extended use of solitary confinement, since this undermines the capacity for moral agency – and permanent felon disenfranchisement. -/- I also address two objections to this line of argument. One focuses on penal practices involving those who are not members of the political community: resident aliens and minors. These two cases raise different issues, but they both appear to show that justifiable punishment does not need to communicate a message which has components affirming agency and membership of a political community. I argue that in both cases the justifiability of punishment piggy-backs on the kind of justification available in the standard case. A second objection suggests that the offender has excluded themselves from the political community, and that measures that recognize this are therefore acceptable: I argue that very few offences, if any, have this character. ---. (shrink)

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include: Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior; Political philosophy – fundamental questions about the (...) nature of states and their relationship to the citizens within those states Epistemology – what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; and whether we should form beliefs by trusting what other people tell us; Philosophy of mind – what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Philosophy of science – foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice, such as whether scientific theories are true; and Metaphysics - fundamental questions about the nature of reality, such as whether we have free will, or whether time travel is possible. This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ MOOC created by the University of Edinburgh’s _Eidyn_ research centre, and hosted by the Coursera platform.This book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline. (shrink)

Epistemological contextualism has become one of the most important and widely discussed new proposals in the theory of knowledge. This special issue contributes to the debate by bringing together some of the main participants to provide a state-of-the-art discussion of the proposal. Here we offer a brief overview of the contextualist position, describe some of the main lines of criticism that have been levelled against the view, and present a summary of each of the contributions to this collection.

This paper critically explores Nuno Venturinha’s discussion of the Wittgensteinian notion of epistemic vertigo in the context of the radical sceptical problematic, at least as that notion has been recently articulated by Duncan Pritchard.

Although Hume’s theory of the passions has been vigorously criticized by contemporary philosophers, Hume’s immediate successors are seldom credited with serious criticisms of that theory. In fact, insofar as their views are considered at all, they typically are summarily dismissed. Alasdair MacIntyre’s treatment is a good illustration.

This volume introduces readers to the main problems and positions in epistemology. It shows where these problems and positions connect and where they part thereby providing a valuable resource both for following connections between ideas and for appreciating the place of key figures and concepts in the subject.

Philosophy, Science and Religion for Everyone brings together these great truth-seeking disciplines, and seeks to understand the ways in which they challenge and inform each other. Key topics and their areas of focus include: - Foundational Issues - why should anyone care about the science-and-religion debate? How do scientific claims relate to the truth? Is evolution compatible with design? - Faith and Rationality - can faith ever be rational? Are theism and atheism totally opposed? Is God hidden or does God (...) simply not exist? - Faith and Science - what provides a better explanation for the origin of the universe-science or religion? Faith and physics: can they be reconciled? Does contemporary neuroscience debunk religious belief? Creationism and evolutionary biology - what constitutes science and what constitutes pseudo-science? - Practical Implications - is fundamentalism just a problem for religious people? What are the ethical implications of the science-and-religion debate? Do logic and religion mix? This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Philosophy, Science and Religion' MOOC (massive open online course) created by the University of Edinburgh, and hosted by the Coursera platform (www.coursera.org). This book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a concise overview of this fascinating discipline. (shrink)

This is a collective study of philosophical questions to do with experts and expertise, such as: What is an expert? Who decides who the experts are? Should we always defer to experts? How should expertise inform public policy? What happens when the experts disagree? Must experts be unbiased? Does it matter what the source of the expertise is?

We have been conducting IAPC workshops for teachers together since 1982. Most of these workshops have been held in Michigan. However, occasionally we have conducted workshops in other states as well. In fact, our introduction to each other was at a workshop we conducted in another state.

In this collection of essays, Strawson investigates wide-ranging topics pertaining to the nature of the self: What do we mean by the term ‘self’? In what sense do selves exist? To what extent is continuity over time essential to selfhood? Must one be able to make a story of one’s life in order to be a coherent self? Must one be self-conscious in order to be conscious at all? and more. The fourteen essays here are not necessarily meant to be (...) read in order. They do not offer a sustained argument, but rather a number of themes that appear in different places, like threads in a tapestry. (shrink)

It is argued that the arguments put forward by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in their widely influential exchange on the problem of moral luck are marred by a failure to (i) present a coherent understanding of what is involved in the notion of luck, and (ii) adequately distinguish between the problem of moral luck and the analogue problem of epistemic luck, especially that version of the problem that is traditionally presented by the epistemological sceptic. It is further claimed that (...) once one offers a more developed notion of luck and disambiguates the problem of moral luck from the problem of epistemic luck (especially in its sceptical guise), neither of these papers is able to offer unambiguous grounds for thinking that there is a problem of moral luck. Indeed, it is shown that insofar as these papers succeed in making a prima facie case for the existence of epistemic luck, it is only the familiar sceptical variant of this problem that they identify. (shrink)