Would democratic theory in its empirical and normative guises be in a better position without the theory of the deliberative public sphere? In this paper I explore recent theories of agonistic democracy that have answered this question in the affirmative. I question their assertionthat the theory of the public sphere should be abandoned in favor of a model of democratic politics based on political contestation. Furthermore, I explore one of the fundamental assumptionsat work in the debate about the theory of (...) the public sphere’s status, namely the assumed opposition between consensus and contestation. Questioning the rigid nature of the opposition, I go on to argue that the deliberative theory of the public sphere actually facilitates the development of the agonistic approach to democratic theory and practice. Key Words: agonistic democracy • deliberative democracy • democratic theory • Habermas • theory of the public sphere. (shrink)

One of the most dominant approaches to semantics for relevant (and many paraconsistent) logics is the Routley-Meyer semantics involving a ternary relation on points. To some (many?), this ternary relation has seemed like a technical trick devoid of an intuitively appealing philosophical story that connects it up with conditionality in general. In this paper, we respond to this worry by providing three different philosophical accounts of the ternary relation that correspond to three conceptions of conditionality. We close by briefly discussing (...) a general conception of conditionality that may unify the three given conceptions. (shrink)

Having taught management ethics for several years, I have been repeatedly frustrated by the practical mismatch between management problems and moral philosophy…. Unless we can connect ethical theory more closely with management practice, we may be dressing our business curriculum windows with philosophical finery but failing to meet the urgent need for clarity of thought in management ethics.

John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education emphasizes the need to develop the habit of rationally judging which desires should be fulfilled. While nurture plays an essential role in this development, nature provides the fundamental desire for self-preservation, the end in light of which reason makes its judgments. The significance of this natural element in Lockean virtue has generally been overlooked, but it becomes clear through a comparison to Aristotelian virtue. Locke rejects any virtue that would require changing our most (...) basic desires, and he does so as part of his rejection of a political order designed for such education. Locke’s account of education is not purely transformative; rather, it is intended to prevent the transformation that would be part of an Aristotelian moral education. (shrink)

This volume is an indispensable reference for a wide range of scholars working across multidisciplinary fields of inquiry that focus on British and continental histories of medicine and sexuality, gender history and studies of nineteenth ...

Hanna proposes a version of non-conceptualism he closely associates with Kant. This paper takes issue with his proposal on two fronts. First, there are reasons to dispute whether any version of non-conceptualism can be rightly attributed to Kant. In addition to pointing out passages that conflict with Hanna's interpretation, I also suggest ways in which the Kant of the Opus Postumum could integrate key insights of non-conceptualism into a basically conceptualist framework. In Part Two of the paper, I turn to (...) a more systematically oriented critique of Hanna's nonconceptualism. Drawing on work by Gareth Evans, John McDowell, Sonia Sedivy, and Alva Noë, I argue that conceptualism is in a position to integrate the points which are taken by Hanna to speak most strongly in favor of non-conceptualism. In particular, I argue for the deep compatibility of conceptualism and direct realism. At the same time, I point to what I see as weaknesses in Hanna's defence of non-conceptualism. (shrink)

This article explores John's Muir's writings in order to construct a Muirian environmental aesthetics. To this end, I draw out three key features. First is the aesthetic category of sublimity as it emerges in his explorations of Yosemite. Second, a distinctive, pluralistic environmental aesthetics is found through his interweaving of aesthetic, religious, and scientific ideas. Third, his journals from the Thousand‐Mile Walk reveal an active and situated aesthetics, shaped by his practice of exploring and communing with nature. Together, these (...) features support a perspective that is quite contemporary, in tune with environmental and everyday aesthetics, as well as with recent work in environmental ethics. (shrink)

John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education emphasizes the need to develop the habit of rationally judging which desires should be fulfilled. While nurture plays an essential role in this development, nature provides the fundamental desire for self-preservation, the end in light of which reason makes its judgments. The significance of this natural element in Lockean virtue has generally been overlooked, but it becomes clear through a comparison to Aristotelian virtue. Locke rejects any virtue that would require changing our most (...) basic desires, and he does so as part of his rejection of a political order designed for such education. Locke’s account of education is not purely transformative; rather, it is intended to prevent the transformation that would be part of an Aristotelian moral education. (shrink)

This paper assesses Michael Brady’s claim that the ‘capture and consumption of attention’ in an emotion facilitates evaluative understanding. It argues that emotional attention is epistemically deleterious on its own, even though it can be beneficial in conjunction with the right epistemic skills and motivations. The paper considers Sartre’s and Solomon’s claim that emotions have purposes, respectively, to circumvent difficulty or maximize self-esteem. While this appeal to purposes is problematic, it suggests a promising alternative conception of how emotions can (...) be teleological. The fact that emotional attention manifests dispositions, which have been habituated by repeated association with pleasure or relief, explains how the emotion can acquire the function of producing pleasure or relief. Hence, the emotion can have ‘non-cognitive function,’ in which its patterns of attention reliably produce beliefs that disregard or distort the truth. Not only is non-cognitive function the default condition of emotion prior to any training, but even those who have successfully trained their emotions often revert back to non-cognitive function when faced with trauma or stress. (shrink)

This review considers Michael Brady's account of the positive epistemic role of emotions. Brady claims that emotions can facilitate evaluative understanding because they "capture and consume" a person's attention. This review claims that there is a difference between emotions that are intrinsically productive of evaluative understanding and those are productive of evaluative understanding only because of the contribution of other, non-emotional states. Accordingly, Brady has not yet established that emotions fall in the former category, rather than the (...) latter, and thus leaves open that emotions may have a neutral or negative epistemic role on their own. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's book Epistemic Injustice is an original and stimulating contribution to contemporary epistemology. Fricker's main aim is to illustrate the ethical aspects of two of our basic epistemic practices, namely conveying knowledge to others and making sense of our own social experiences. In particular, she wishes to investigate the idea that there are prevalent and distinctively epistemic forms of injustice related to these aspects of our epistemic lives, injustices which reflect the fact that our actual epistemic practices are socially (...) situated. Most of the book focuses on two such forms – Testimonial Injustice and Hermeneutical Injustice – and on the epistemic virtues required to counteract them.Testimonial Injustice occurs when a hearer fails, because of prejudice, to give due credit to the word of a speaker. For instance, in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the jury in the trial of Tom Robinson fail to regard his testimony as credible because he …. (shrink)

Direct theories of the virtues maintain that an explanation of why some virtuous trait counts as valuable should ultimately appeal to the value of its characteristic motive or aim. In this paper I argue that, if we take the idea of a direct approach to virtue theory seriously, we should favour a view according to which virtue involves knowledge. I raise problems for recent “agent-based” and “end-based” versions of the direct approach, show how my account proves preferable to these, and (...) defend it against a number of objections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The question of this article is whether the saturated phenomenon as articulated in the early work of Jean-Luc Marion may appear within language and history, or in other words how a non- or extra-horizonal event can appear within the horizons necessary for communication and communality. This problem is significant, among other reasons, because saturated aesthetic, ethical, and religious phenomena constitute important bases for communal values. The article argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of language offers resources that allow us to (...) understand how a saturated phenomenon can appear communicably and communally without sacrificing the irreducible excessiveness of its appearance. The author draws on parallels between Marion and Gadamer to argue that the poetic word and the conversation present possibilities of the saturated phenomenon occurring within language and history, and suggests the “saturated question” as a name for this mode of appearance. (shrink)

Over the last several decades Ellen Dissanayake has developed an evolutionary theory of art that views all art as having evolved for the function of promoting group cohesion. This theory is not without its critics, yet it has received little empirical attention. In this article I propose a more modest formulation of Dissanayake’s hypothesis and proceed to test it using a cross-cultural analysis. I rely on the ethnographic databases of the electronic Human Relations Area Files as well as the Standard (...) Cross-Cultural Sample to compare proxies for group cohesion with measures of ritual art, a subset of art that I theoretically define. While my results cannot decisively prove or disprove Dissanayake’s hypothesis, they do lend empirical support to her views. This is promising not only for her views but for outlining ways of empirically testing other views in evolutionary aesthetics. (shrink)

This issue of the Bucknell Review studies the achievements of phenomenology and structuralism and their role in philosophy and in preparing for the emergence of semiotics. The articles in this volume reflect the preoccupations of the past decade. It is hoped that these essays will suggest some practical critical analysis on this subject.

This volume brings together papers by some of the leading figures working on virtue-theoretic accounts in both ethics and epistemology. A collection of cutting edge articles by leading figures in the field of virtue theory including Guy Axtell, Julia Driver, Antony Duff and Miranda Fricker. The first book to combine papers on both virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Deals with key topics in recent epistemological and ethical debate.

The first-order theory of the lattice of recursively enumerable closed subsets of an effective topological space is proved undecidable using the undecidability of the first-order theory of the lattice of recursively enumerable sets. In particular, the first-order theory of the lattice of recursively enumerable closed subsets of Euclidean n -space, for all n , is undecidable. A more direct proof of the undecidability of the lattice of recursively enumerable closed subsets of Euclidean n -space, n ⩾ 2, is provided using (...) the method of reduction and the recursive inseparability of the set of all formulae satisfiable in every model of the theory of SIBs and the set of all formulae refutable in some finite model of the theory of SIBs. (shrink)

Abstract Agent-based virtue ethics is a unitary normative theory according to which the moral status of actions is entirely dependent upon the moral status of an agent's motives and character traits. One of the problems any such approach faces is to capture the common-sense distinction between an agent's doing the right thing, and her doing it for the right (or wrong) reason. In this paper I argue that agent-based virtue ethics ultimately fails to capture this kind of fine-grained distinction, and (...) to this extent ought to be rejected. I focus first on Michael Slote's agent-based theory, according to which the moral status of actions depends upon an agent's actual motives, and argue that this leads to a paradox. I then consider whether the ?counterfactual? version of agent-basing favoured by Rosalind Hursthouse and Linda Zagzebski fares any better, and conclude that it does not. (shrink)

There are many important methodological decisions that need to be made when examining emotional reactivity in psychopathology. In the present study, we examined the effects of two such decisions in an investigation of emotional reactivity in depression: (1) which (if any) comparison condition to employ; and (2) how to define change. Depressed (N = 69) and control (N = 37) participants viewed emotion-inducing film clips while subjective and facial responses were measured. Emotional reactivity was defined using no comparison condition (i.e., (...) raw scores), baseline comparison condition (i.e., no stimulus presented), and neutral comparison condition (i.e., neutral stimulus presented). Change in emotional reactivity was assessed using four analytic approaches: difference scores, percentage change, residualised change, and ANCOVA. Results differed among the three comparison conditions and among several of the analytic approaches. Overall, our investigation suggests that choosing a comparison condition and the definition of change can significantly influence the presence of group differences in emotional reactivity. Recommendations for studies of emotional reactivity in psychopathology are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores the practice of rewilding and its implications for environmental aesthetic values, qualities and experiences. First, we consider the temporal dimensions of rewilding in regard to the emergence of particular aesthetic qualities over time, and our aesthetic appreciation of these. Second, we discuss how rewilding potentially brings about difficult aesthetic experiences, such as the unscenic and the ugly. Finally, we make progress in critically understanding how rewilding may be understood as a distinctive form of ecological restoration, while resisting (...) the assimilation of rewilding into wilderness discourses. (shrink)