This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

AI and people do not compete on a level-playing field. Self-driving vehicles may be safer than human drivers, but laws often penalize such technology. People may provide superior customer service, but businesses are automating to reduce their taxes. AI may innovate more effectively, but an antiquated legal framework constrains inventive AI. In The Reasonable Robot, Ryan Abbott argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior and proposes a new legal principle that will ultimately improve human (...) well-being. This work should be read by anyone interested in the rapidly evolving relationship between AI and the law. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full (...) story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common (...) property arrangements be converted to privatized units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons. (shrink)

This book gives an account of a full spectrum of property rights and their relationship to individual liberty. It shows that a purely deontological approach to justice can deal with the most complex questions regarding the property system. Moreover, the author considers the economic, ecological, and technological complexities of our real-world property systems. The result is a more conceptually sound account of natural rights and the property system they demand. If we think that liberty should be at the centre of (...) justice, what does that mean for the property system? Economists and lawyers widely agree that a property system must be composed of many different types of property: the kind of private ownership one has over one's person and immediate possessions, as well as the kinds of common ownership we each have in our local streets, as well as many more. However, theories of property and justice have not given anything approaching an adequate account of the relationship between liberty and any other form of property other than private ownership. It is often thought that a basic commitment to liberty cannot really tell us how to arrange the major complexities of the property system, which diverge from simple private ownership. Property and Justice demonstrates how philosophical rigour coupled with interdisciplinary engagement enables us to think clearly about how to deal with real-world problems. It will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, and legal theorists working on property rights and justice. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner argues that a necessary and sufficient condition for the compossibility of a set of rights is that those rights be extensionally differentiable. However, given that two or more actions can extensionally overlap without thereby being mutually unperformable, if such actions are specified in the relevant rights, then those rights will not be incompossible, notwithstanding their extensional overlap. The set of compossible sets of rights then is greater than the subset of extensionally differentiable rights, and extensional differentiability is a (...) sufficient but unnecessary condition of compossibility. (shrink)

Over the centuries the term “talent” has changed semantically and slowly transformed itself into a floating signifier or become an accidental designator. The term “talent” no longer has one single meaning and a “referent” in real life, but instead a multiplicity of meaning and references to something beyond real life, something indefinite and indefinable. In other words, today we do not know specifically what the term “talent” in talent management really means or refers to. Indeed, this is problematical, because in (...) late modernity the term “talent” has become a popular and frequently used key term among business consultants and, within the science of human resource management, a cornerstone in the discipline of “talent management”, and not knowing what the term really means will turn any talent discussion, talent identification and talent recruitment into a question of subjectivity and belief in talent rather than objectivity and knowledge of talent. (shrink)

This edited collection offers a critical appreciation of talent management in contrast to the extensive literature adopting mainstream approaches to the topic. The authors explore fundamental questions in the field to better understand why managing talent seems so attractive as a management practice, the meaning of talent, and how talent is recognised in organisations. The mix of conceptual and empirical chapters in the book teases out some critical perspectives that will provoke thought and reflection among practitioners and stimulate ideas for (...) new research topics and approaches. The diverse contributions presented in this book will undoubtedly be of use to academics, practitioners and postgraduate students of human resource management. (shrink)

Contextualizing his views of government and the political community within the Ancient World, this history of political philosophy explores the revolutionary ideas from Plato's greatest pupil that built the foundation for a democratic tradition that is still alive today.

Many libertarians ground their theory of justice in a non-aggression principle. The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a (...) satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment to non-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach. (shrink)

This essay examines whether or not absurdity is intrinsic to human life. It takes Camus’ interpretation of ‘The Absurd’ as its conceptual starting point. It traces such thought back to Schopenhauer, whose work is then critically analysed. This analysis focuses primarily on happiness and meaning. This essay accepts some of Schopenhauer’s premises, but rejects his conclusions. Instead, it considers Nietzsche’s alternatives and the role of suffering in life. It posits that suffering may help people acquire meaning and escape absurdity. It (...) then analyses the role of compassion in absurdity, in reference to Nietzsche’s work and Buddhist teachings. Lastly, it examines absurdity in relation to death, rejecting the notion that death exacerbates absurdity. This paper understands absurdity to be a natural part of the human condition, as characterised by suffering, death and an absence of meaning. It concludes that although human life is absurd by nature, it need not remain so. (shrink)

Editor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom far richer than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our (...) thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball"... Read More. (shrink)

Ben Bryan argues that the strongest challenge to natural rights theory is to explain how it overcomes the Problem of Authority. Given that our natural rights are multiply realisable by a range of equally reasonable social conventions, how or why ought one particular realisation have authority? I argue that Thomistic and Kantian solutions to this problem do not count as solutions from natural rights theory, and therefore offer my own solution. When theories of natural rights describe the rights we have (...) in terms that refer not only to moralised act-types, but rather, tell us which non-moralised act-types ought to be moralised in the relevant way, they avoid the Problem of Authority altogether. Such theories of natural rights are singularly realisable at the level of regulative conventional rules, and only multiply realisable at the level of constitutive conventional rules. The latter form of multiple realisability does not raise the Problem of Authority. (shrink)

Billy Dunaway develops and defends a framework for realism about morality. He defends the idea that moral properties are privileged parts of reality which are the referents for our moral terms. He suggests how it is that we can know about morality, and what the limits to moral disagreement are.

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

This paper looks at the phenomenon of ethical vagueness by asking the question, how ought one to reason about what to do when confronted with a case of ethical vagueness? I begin by arguing that we must confront this question, since ethical vagueness is inescapable. I then outline one attractive answer to the question: we ought to maximize expected moral value when confronted with ethical vagueness. This idea yields determinate results for what one rationally ought to do in cases of (...) ethical vagueness. But what it recommends is dependent on which substantive theory of vagueness is true; one can't draw conclusions about how to reason about vagueness in ethics in the absence of concrete assumptions about the nature of vagueness. (shrink)

This book explores the constraints which justice imposes on immigration policy. Like liberal nationalists, Ryan Pevnick argues that citizens have special claims to the institutions of their states. However, the source of these special claims is located in the citizenry's ownership of state institutions rather than in a shared national identity. Citizens contribute to the construction and maintenance of institutions, and as a result they have special claims to these institutions and a limited right to exclude outsiders. Pevnick shows (...) that the resulting view justifies a set of policies - including support for certain types of guest worker programs - which is distinct from those supported by either liberal nationalists or advocates of open borders. His book provides a framework for considering a number of connected topics including issues related to self-determination, the scope of distributive justice and the significance of shared national identity. (shrink)

We are becoming increasingly dependent on robots and other forms of artificial intelligence for our beliefs. But how should the knowledge gained from the “say-so” of a robot be classified? Should it be understood as testimonial knowledge, similar to knowledge gained in conversation with another person? Or should it be understood as a form of instrument-based knowledge, such as that gained from a calculator or a sundial? There is more at stake here than terminology, for how we treat objects as (...) sources of knowledge often has important social and legal consequences. In this paper, I argue that at least some robots are capable of testimony. I make my argument by exploring the differences between instruments and testifiers on a well-known account of knowledge: reliabilism. On this approach, I claim that the difference between instruments and testifiers as sources of knowledge is that only the latter are capable of deception. As some robots can be designed to deceive, so they too should be recognized as testimonial sources of knowledge. (shrink)

"Wokini, " translated from Lakota, means "seeking a new beginning." On that theme, the famous athlete joins the bestselling author to blend modern therapeutic principles and Native American tradition.

This article intervenes into contemporary scholarship on affect by bringing different affect theories into the same analytical frame. Analysing commercial surrogacy in India through three different conceptualizations of affect found in the work of Michael Hardt, Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi reveals how affect emerges as a malleable state in the practice of, as a circulatory force in the debates around, and as an ephemeral intensity in the spontaneous resistance to surrogacy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that integrating different (...) theories of affect enables more holistic examinations of corporeal regulation by opening our understanding to the multiple lives of affect that operate on the level of political economy, cultural signification and material intensity simultaneously. (shrink)

Quasi-realist Expressivists offer accounts of normative truth, normative facts, and normative properties which make their view apparently indistinguishable from Realist views on these subjects. This chapter explores the idea that there is still a substantial metaphysical difference between Realism and Quasi-realism, since they differ over the extent to which normative properties are metaphysically elite in David Lewis’s sense. Eliteness is an explanatory notion, and Realists need the explanatory features of eliteness to explain how different communities refer to the same property (...) with their word “ought.” While Quasi-realists can agree with Realists about which property “ought” refers to, the same resources they use to explain normative truth, reference, and facthood also explain why the referential facts are this way. Thus eliteness does not enter the explanatory picture for the Quasi-realist, and the metaphysics of obligation looks very different on the Realist and Quasi-realist views. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease 2019 can lead to respiratory failure. Some patients require extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support. During the current pandemic, health care resources in some cities have been overwhelmed, and doctors have faced complex decisions about resource allocation. We present a case in which a pediatric hospital caring for both children and adults seeks to establish guidelines for the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation if there are not enough resources to treat every patient. Experts in critical care, end-of-life care, bioethics, and (...) health policy discuss if age should guide rationing decisions. (shrink)

The scope of libertarian law is normally limited to the application of the non-aggression principle (NAP), nothing more and nothing less. However, judging when the NAP has been violated requires not only a conception of praxeological notions such as aggression, but also interpretive understanding of what synthetic events count as the relevant praxeological types. Interpretive understanding—or verstehen—can be extremely heterogeneous between agents. The particular verständnis taken by a judge has considerable moral and political implications. Since selecting a verständnis is pre-requisite (...) to applying the NAP, the NAP itself cannot tell us which one we ought morally to choose. Therefore the application of the NAP calls on moral and political considerations outside of the NAP itself. Since some of these are more consistent with an endorsement of the NAP than others, libertarianism is not a “thin” commitment to the NAP alone, but a “thick” commitment to the NAP and other supporting moral and political considerations. (shrink)

This new study provides a refreshing look at the issue of exceptions and shows that much of the problem stems from a failure to recognize at least two kinds of exception-ridden law: ceteris paribus laws and ideal laws. Billy Wheeler offers the first book-length discussion of ideal laws. The key difference between these two kinds of laws concerns the nature of the conditions that need to be satisfied and their epistemological role in the law’s formulation and discovery. He presents (...) a Humean-inspired approach that draws heavily on concepts from the information and computing sciences. Specifically, Wheeler argues that laws are best seen as algorithms for compressing empirical data and that ideal laws are needed as 'lossy compressors' for complex data. Major figures in the metaphysics of science receive special attention such as Ronald Giere, Bas van Fraassen, Nancy Cartwright, David Lewis and Marc Lange. This book is essential reading for philosophers of science and will interest metaphysicians, epistemologists and others interested in applying concepts from computing to traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally – both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are (...) on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism.” We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks. Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. Firstly, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Secondly, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just – thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”. (shrink)

Can our beloved cats and dogs love us back? This chapter aims to find a satisfactory theory of love that substantiates the claim that they can. It begins by reconstructing and critically evaluating recent attempts by scientists to show that dogs can love humans back. Although these attempts are argued to be unsuccessful, it is further argued that they illuminate the need for an adequate theory of love and offer us some plausible ideas about love that direct us to two (...) recent philosophical theories of love that support the idea that dogs can love humans back. These two theories are discussed in detail before it is argued that dogs, but not cats, seem capable of loving humans under these theories. These theory-based defenses of the belief that dogs can love humans back are then criticized on the grounds that the theories they use are unsatisfactory because they fail to capture three central truths about love. This leads to a third theory of love that, after some friendly amendments, is argued to be a tentatively adequate theory that provisionally vindicates the claim that dogs, but not cats, can love humans back. (shrink)

This paper is about avoiding commitment to an ontology of possible worlds with two primitives: a hyperintensional connective like ‘in virtue of’, and primitive quantification into predicate position. I argue that these tools (which some believe can be independently motivated) render dispensable the ontology of possible worlds needed by traditional anaylses of modality. They also shed new light on the notion of truth-at-a-world.

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

Este artículo tiene por objeto destacar la relevancia de una noción de “muerte impersonal” en el horizonte de una indagación no antropocentrada de lo biopolítico. En tanto no se rige por la teleología del principio antrópico, la filosofía contemporánea considera lo impersonal como una resistencia al biopoder, aunque suele concentrarse en los avatares del concepto de Vida. Aquí, avanzamos en el examen de los rasgos de la muerte impersonal en dos pensadores cuyas obras resultan fundamentales para estas líneas de trabajo (...) contemporáneas. En Nietzsche, analizamos la cuestión de la “muerte libre” y la imagen de la ceniza, dando cuenta de las posibilidades que allí se vislumbran para una reivindicación de lo impersonal. Luego, subrayamos sus semejanzas y derivaciones en los conceptos blanchotianos de “momento deseado” y “tiempo muerto”. (shrink)

Resumen: A mediados del siglo XX, Blanchot elabora una crítica minuciosa de algunos tópicos de Camus. Su interés, sobre todo, se centra en la renovación camusiana del cogito sintetizada en la fórmula Me rebelo, luego somos. Para Blanchot, el hombre desgraciado ha perdido el poder de decir “Yo” y, por ello, es una figura de lo impersonal que no puede ser reconducida a la persona. Sin embargo, esto no implica la renuncia a la insumisión: Blanchot recupera la figura de Sísifo (...) para mostrar que hay una rebeldía de lo impersonal que excede al hombre, marcando así el camino a la “resistencia de lo neutro” que sería reivindicada por la filosofía francesa e italiana del siglo XXI.: In the mid-20th century, Blanchot developed a thorough critique of some of Camus’ topics. His interest mainly focused on the renewal of the camusian cogito synthesized in the formula “I rebel, therefore we are.” For Blanchot, the hapless man has lost the power to say “I” and is thus a figure of the impersonal that cannot be redirected to the person. Nevertheless, this does not entail a waiver of rebelliousness: Blanchot recovered the figure of Sisyphus to show that there is a rebellion of the impersonal that exceeds man, indicating the way to the “resistance of the neutral” to be claimed by French and Italian philosophy of the 21st century. (shrink)

Through Blanchot’s and Derrida’s reading of Artaud’s work, this article argues that an anthropic decentering of writing enables the redefinition of a non-dialectical and nonsubstantial materialism which does justice to the impersonal and organoleptic character of art, given that it does not reduce it to the human representative horizon. The conceptual path we follow intends to point out that Blanchot and Derrida retrieve a certain logic from Artaud’s works which implies a reconfiguration of the notion of surface and concomitantly forces (...) a new ontological and aesthetic approach. The latter reveals the need to maintain a distance from the modern horizon in order to offer a space for the materials’ inorganic power without depriving it of animation and, at the same time, to vindicate the living without yielding it to human requirements. (shrink)

Over the last few decades climate change has been gaining importance in international scientific and political debates. However, the social sciences, especially in Latin America, have only lately become interested in the subject and their approach is still vague. Scientific understanding of global environmental change and the process of designing public policies to face them are characterized by their complexity as well as by epistemic and normative uncertainties. This makes it necessary to problematize the way in which research efforts understand (...) ‘the social’ of climate change. How do ‘the climate’ and ‘the social’ interpenetrate as scientific objects? What does the resulting field look like? Is the combination capable of promoting reflexivity and collaboration on the issue, or does it merely become dispersed with diffuse boundaries? Our paper seeks to answer these and other related questions using Chile as a case study and examining peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic. By combining in-depth qualitative content analysis of each paper with a statistical meta-analysis, we were able to: characterize the key content and forms of such literature; identify divisions and patterns within it; and, discuss some factors and trends that may help explain these. We conclude that the literature displays two competing trends: while it is inclined to become fragmented beyond the scope of the ‘mitigation’ black box, it also tends to cluster along the lines of methodological distinctions traditionally contested within the social sciences. This, in turn, highlights the persistence of disciplinary divisions within an allegedly interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

To what extent are the answers to theological questions knowable? And if the relevant answers are knowable, which sorts of inquirers are in a position to know them? In this chapter we shall not answer these questions directly but instead supply a range of tools that may help us make progress here. The tools consist of plausible structural constraints on knowledge. After articulating them, we shall go on to indicate some ways in which they interact with theological scepticism. In some (...) cases the structural constraints bear directly on whether one can know answers to theological questions. But the structural considerations are related to theological scepticism in other interesting ways as well; for instance we will also be using them to explore the significance of scepticism, by addressing questions such as ‘To what extent does it matter whether or not we can know the answer to theological questions?’. (shrink)

En este trabajo abordamos la noción de naturaleza que el materialismo posthumano pone en juego y que supone una reflexión sobre la relación del arte con el mundo, la materialidad y la emancipación. Retomando el planteo de Adorno, según el cual el materialismo se muestra como la tensión insuperable entre el “desnudamiento” relativo de las potencias de los materiales y la articulación en constelaciones nuevas que aquel posibilita, analizamos críticamente la tarea que implica para el arte: servir de voz a (...) la naturaleza oprimida y dañada. A través de los recorridos de Foucault, Latour y Schwarzböck sobre estos temas, y haciendo intervenir al pensamiento ecológico, señalamos un camino a explorar en el cual la estética filosófica se halla ante nuevos desafíos. (shrink)