Many authors suggest the need to define ‘sustainable development’in operational terms. This paper looks at the problems ofattempting to ask whether peasant farming systems are sustainable.Any attempt at sustainability assessment needs to consider issuesrelated to the selected indicators or performance criteria, spatialscale or boundaries, and temporal scale. While there is certainlya need for more rigorous analysis of sustainability issues, thereis limited outlook for an approach based on indicators. Even if themany purely technical problems associated with specific indicatorscan be surmounted, will (...) accurate bio-physical data advance ourknowledge about sustainability? Peasant systems arepolitically-guided management systems, whose boundaries are the state,not the field or the farm. Given the dynamic nature of peasant farmingsystems, where do we draw the line in assessing sustainability?Attempts at sustainability assessment 100 years ago or even 20–30years ago would have been completely superseded by events. We drawattention to the system as a whole, to a web of interconnections,causes and effects – of varying significance over both time andspace. (shrink)

We bear witness to a sweeping social movement for change—fostered and driven by a powerful group of Black nurses and nursing students determined to call out and dismantle anti‐Black racism and discrimination within the profession of nursing. The Black Nurses Task Force, launched by the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) in July 2020, is building momentum for long‐standing change in the profession by critically examining the racist and discriminatory history of nursing, listening to and learning from the lived experiences (...) of the Black nursing community, and shaping concrete, actionable steps to confront anti‐Black racism and discrimination in academic settings, workplaces, and nursing organizations. The Black Nurses Task Force and the RNAO are standing up and speaking out in acknowledgment of the magnitude of anti‐Black racism and discrimination that exist in our profession, health system, justice system, and economic system. This social movement is demonstrating, in actions, how individuals and a collective act as change agents to drive meaningful and widespread change for our present and future Black nurses. We also acknowledge the Black nurses who have gone before us. (shrink)

Racism against Black people, Indigenous and other racialized people continues to exist in healthcare and academic settings. Racism produces profound harm to racialized people. Strategies to address systemic racism must be implemented to bring about sustainable changes in healthcare and academic settings. This quality improvement initiative provides strategies to address systemic racism and discrimination against Black nurses and nursing students in Ontario, Canada. It is part of a broader initiative showcasing Black nurses in action to end racism and discrimination. We (...) have found that people who have experienced racism need healing, support and protection including trauma-related services to facilitate their healing. Implementing multi-level, multi-pronged interventions in workplaces will create healthy work environments for all members of society, especially Black nurses who are both clients/patients and providers of healthcare. (shrink)

Bradley's rich and complex version of Absolute Idealism plays a key role not only in Idealist philosophy, politics, and ethics, but also in the development of modern logic, analytical philosophy, and pragmatism, as well as in the thinking of such figures as R. G. Collingwood and A. N. Whitehead. Topics covered include: the history of Idealism in the twentieth century; Bradley's relation to figures such as Bernard Bosanquet, C. A. Campbell, Brand Blanshard, John Watson, John Dewey, and (...) others; Bradley's influence on twentieth-century empiricism, modern logic, and analytical philosophy; and his significance for contemporary debates in epistemology and ethics. (shrink)

The concepts of time and identity seem at once unproblematic and frustratingly difficult. Time is an intricate part of our experience -- it would seem that the passage of time is a prerequisite for having any experience at all -- and yet recalcitrant questions about time remain. Is time real? Does time flow? Do past and future moments exist? Philosophers face similarly stubborn questions about identity, particularly about the persistence of identical entities through change. Indeed, questions about the metaphysics of (...) persistence take on many of the complexities inherent in philosophical considerations of time. This volume of original essays brings together these two essentially related concepts in a way not reflected in the available literature, making it required reading for philosophers working in metaphysics and students interested in these topics. The contributors, distinguished authors and rising scholars, first consider the nature of time and then turn to the relation of identity, focusing on the metaphysical connections between the two, with a special emphasis on personal identity. The volume concludes with essays on the metaphysics of death, issues in which time and identity play a significant role. This groundbreaking collection offers both cutting-edge epistemological analysis and historical perspectives on contemporary topics. Contributors:_ _Harriet Baber, Lynne Rudder Baker, Ben Bradley, John W. Carroll, Reinaldo Elugardo, Geoffrey Gorham, Mark Hinchliff, Jenann Ismael, Barbara Levenbook, Andrew Light, Lawrence B. Lombard, Ned Markosian, Harold Noonan, John Perry, Harry S. Silverstein, Matthew H. Slater, Robert J. Stainton, Neil A. Tognazzini The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to present a systematic account of F. H. Bradley's philosophy in so far as it is relevant to an understanding of his conception of the nature and criterion of truth. I argue that, for Bradley, the nature of truth is the identity of thought with reality given in immediate experience. There is no absolute separation between thought and its object. Bradley therefore rejects both the correspondence theory and epistemological realism. Thought is (...) not just a mirror which reflects an independently existing reality. ;Concerning the criterion of truth, I argue that his criterion for our ordinary and scientific beliefs is practice, and the criterion for philosophical positions is a kind of coherence based on the doctrine of relative truth. For Bradley, some positions are truer than others, and the best philosophy is a comprehensive system which contains the truth of all different positions. ;Bradley does not accept the coherence theory of justification as it is understood today, since it is based on the standard account of negation and the doctrine of absolute truth. Bradley has a different approach to negation and inconsistency, according to which there are no absolutely inconsistent beliefs. Further, he insists that truth is not absolute but "relative," a matter of degree. All philosophical positions contain some truth, and none is completely false. The truth in philosophy is a position which accounts for the whole of reality and includes all apparently inconsistent positions within it. ;I explain Bradley's place in the history of philosophy and show his connections with the British empiricist tradition. I believe one of Bradley's central concerns is to explain the nature and criterion of truth in philosophy within the constraints of empiricism. I also contrast Bradley's positions on important issues with those of philosophers in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, such as Russell, Moore, Ayer, Tarski, Quine, Churchland, Lehrer and Campbell. I argue that most recent commentators on Bradley overlook the importance of understanding his philosophy as a system constructed according to the doctrine of relative truth. (shrink)

Modern epistemology has run into several paradoxes in its efforts to explain how knowledge acquisition can be both socially based and still able to determine objective facts about the world. In this important book, Richmond Campbell attempts to dispel some of these paradoxes, to show how they are ultimately just "illusions of paradox," by developing ideas central to two of the most promising currents in epistemology: feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology. Campbell's aim is to construct a coherent theory (...) of knowing that is feminist and "naturalized." Illusions of Paradox will be valuable for students and scholars of epistemology and women's studies. (shrink)

This paper examines the implications of the context-sensitivity of counterfactuals for the correctness of emotions and attitudes towards death. I argue that the correctness of an attitude such as fear must be explained by appeal to its causal relations to certain preferences.

T. H. Green was a leading member of the British Idealist movement, which adopted the continental philosophy of Hegel and Kant while rejecting utilitarianism. As well as being a prominent philosopher, Green was an influential educational reformer and an active member of the Liberal party. Green's writings can be placed into three categories: religion, philosophy and politics. This work was the most complete statement of Green's philosophy, although it remained unfinished at his death. Edited by A. C. Bradley, a (...) former student and brother of Green's fellow Idealist F. H. Bradley, the book, which contains four parts, was published posthumously in 1883. Like other Idealists, Green criticised empiricism for creating an unnecessary dualism between thought and the real. (shrink)

This paper explores some aspects of the relation between different ways of achieving a consensus on the judgemental values of a group of indviduals; in particular, aggregation and deliberation. We argue firstly that the framing of an aggregation problem itself generates information that individuals are rationally obliged to take into account. And secondly that outputs of the deliberative process that this initiates is in tension with constraints on consensual values typically imposed by aggregation theory, at least when deliberation is modelled (...) as process of learning from others compatible with Bayesian updating principles. (shrink)

In Chapter 6 of Objects of Credence, Anna Mahtani argues that the opacity of credence raises difficulties for the Principal Principle and proposes a revised principle relating credence and chance that avoids it. In this comment on her book, I both defend Mahtani’s proposed principle against a charge of triviality and argue that the opacity of belief does not threaten the role of chance in guiding credence.

If an agent believes that the probability of E being true is 1/2, should she accept a bet on E at even odds or better? Yes, but only given certain conditions. This paper is about what those conditions are. In particular, we think that there is a condition that has been overlooked so far in the literature. We discovered it in response to a paper by Hitchcock (2004) in which he argues for the 1/3 answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem. (...) Hitchcock argues that this credence follows from calculating her fair betting odds, plus the assumption that Sleeping Beauty’s credences should track her fair betting odds. We will show that this last assumption is false. Sleeping Beauty’s credences should not follow her fair betting odds due to a peculiar feature of her epistemic situation. (shrink)

In this daring blend of Jewish theology, science and Process Thought, theologian Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson explores our actions through Judaism and the sciences as dynamically interactive and mutually informative.

As readers of this journal can attest to, although philosophers and economists are somewhat used to talking to and learning from each other, it tends to be the subset of philosophers working in decision theory, philosophy of science, and particular areas of ethics and political philosophy that contribute to our interdisciplinary field of research. The book that is the subject of this review symposium, Anna Mahtani’s The Objects of Credence (Oxford University Press, 2024), is a wonderful exemplar of what can (...) be learned when a different branch of philosophy is brought to bear on central questions in this field. Both philosophers and economists talk about and work with credences, or degrees of belief, all the time. These are usually modelled as probabilities, which are in turn usually thought of as attaching to propositions. But it has long been argued by philosophers of language that propositions cannot be the objects of credence. Mahtani’s book is an investigation into all that begins to unravel once we accept this insight. The results have profound implications both for rational choice modelling and for welfare economics. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, (...) or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper (this volume) and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder (...) to isolate and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself (and, correlatively, with the conception of moral progress). Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though (as a prophylactic against misunderstanding) I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)

Constitutional interpretation in Canada is dominated by the metaphor of the “living tree”. Living tree constitutional interpretation is usually defined in terms of its incompatibility with what is understood in Canada to be the central commitment of originalist interpretation: that the constitution is, in some sense, “frozen” at the moment of adoption. But the tenets of originalism that are used as a definitional contrast are not widely held by originalist constitutional scholars today, and are in fact expressly rejected in the (...) new originalist theories that have been developed principally in the United States over the past 20 years. There has not been a meaningful engagement in Canada with contemporary schools of originalist interpretation. The originalism rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1985 , is not the new originalism, and a rejection of this new family of interpretive theories does not necessarily follow from the fact of the Supreme Court of Canada’s rejection of original intent originalism. Unfortunately, the Canadian courts have continued to affirm living tree constitutional doctrine and denounce originalism without providing much of an account of what they are accepting or rejecting. This paper is a prefatory study to an engagement with new originalist scholarship. I attempt a statement of the current commitments in Canadian living constitutional doctrine and, in passing, note the Supreme Court’s attitudes towards originalism. My purpose is to determine what the central commitments of living tree constitutional doctrine are, as a preliminary step towards a later study to determine the extent to which Canadian doctrine is truly incompatible with orginalist interpretation. I explore what I observe to be the four central commitments to living tree constitutionalism in Canada: the doctrine of progressive interpretation; the use of a purposive methodology in progressive interpretation; the absence of any necessary role for the original intent or meaning of framers in interpreting the constitution; and the presence of other constraints on judicial interpretation. (shrink)

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

Monothematic delusions are delusions whose contents pertain to a single subject matter. Examples include Capgras delusion, the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor, and Cotard delusion, the delusion that one is dead or does not exist. Two-factor accounts of such delusions hold that they are the result of both an experiential deficit, for instance flattened affect, coupled with an aberrant cognitive response to that deficit. In this paper we develop a new expressivist two-factor account of (...) delusion. In contrast to existing endorsement and explanationist accounts, which treat delusions as either explanations or endorsements of the contents of these disordered experiences, we hold that delusional beliefs have an expressive function: they characterize, in impressionistic terms, what the subject’s experience is like for them. We show how our account improves upon existing two-factor views in explaining the central features of monothematic delusions, in particular the way in which delusional subjects fall short of the ideal of rationality. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between boredom, leisure, selfhood, and education in Kevin Hood Gary’s book, Why Boredom Matters, paying particular attention to connections between Aristotelian and existentialist approaches to the subject. Following Gary, the essay argues that schools force students to endure boredom or try to stimulate them with distractions, rather than helping them focus on enduring sources of meaning or cultivate stronger senses of self.

William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects of his vision, often in (...) an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual. (shrink)

Philosophers traditionally interpret Kant as a retributivist, but modern interpreters, with reference to Kant’s theory of justice and problematic passages, instead propose penal theories that mix retributive and deterrent features. Although these mixed penal theories are substantively compelling and capture the Kantian spirit, their dual aspects lead to a justificatory conflict that generates an apparent dilemma. To resolve this dilemma and clear the ground for these mixed theories, I will outline and reinterpret Kant’s penal theory by situating it in his (...) broader moral and political philosophy. This move grounds the followability requirement, which is necessary to resolve the dilemma. (shrink)

Three main issues are of cardinal interest in this paper. The first issue relates to the canons of discourse—the parameters that inform and guide any discussion—in African philosophy. These canons are accepted in one form or the other by the philosophers who have actually formulated some of them and those who have devoted their academical careers to the promotion of the positive study of African philosophy. Consequently this paper should be viewed in the same light as C.E.M. Joad's A Critique (...) of Logical Positivism in which the “Great Tradition” in philosophy is classically expounded and defended against the onslaught of the philosophical exuberance and extraordinary claims of the logical positivists in the sense that it is a rejoinder to the attack on African philosophy by those who actually may want to be known as African logical neo-positivists. (shrink)