This first comprehensive account of the utilitarians' historical thought intellectually resituates their conceptions of philosophy and politics, at a time when the past acquired new significances as both a means and object of study. Drawing on published and unpublished writings - and set against the intellectual backdrops of Scottish philosophical history, German and French historicism, romanticism, positivism, and the rise of social science and scientific history - Callum Barrell recovers the depth with which Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, George (...) Grote, and John Stuart Mill thought about history as a site of philosophy and politics. He argues that the utilitarians, contrary to their reputations as ahistorical and even antihistorical thinkers, developed complex frameworks in which to learn from and negotiate the past, inviting us to rethink the foundations of their ideas, as well as their place in - and relationship to - nineteenth-century philosophy and political thought. (shrink)

Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called “Big Tech” firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation—or “techlash”—of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. We (...) analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors. However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn “users” and “user engagement” into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics, rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of “techcraft” to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams. (shrink)

From their interpretation of the Australian Citizens’ Jury on genome editing, Scheinerman (2023) concludes that inclusive and diverse deliberative processes of public engagement have salient benefi...

A long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than (...) resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation. (shrink)

Explaining the emergence of the concept in history and how it looks at the past, this title is a guide to the meanings of postmodernism, showing its origins and ...

This book explores the theories of transhumanism and posthumanism, two philosophies that deal with radically changing bodies, minds, and even the nature of humanity itself.

This paper mobilises the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and enjoyment to better understand how processes of education aimed at extending and defending democratic life might respond to and engage with populist politics. I approach this task by engaging with a particular vector of Mouffe and Laclau’s political philosophy, moving from a critique of liberal democracy’s rationalist pretensions to their insistence that left populism and its passionate construction of a ‘people’ is the central task facing radical politics. This attention to the (...) libidinal basis of political identification locates them in a community of Left Lacanian thinkers who reframe the problems of democratic politics in terms of desire and enjoyment rather than miseducation or its lack. Whilst this position might suggest a binary choice between different analytical frames, I inquire into what insights are generated by theorising left populism as an ‘education of desire’. The paper is organised into four main parts: the opening discussion clarifies my understanding of education by engaging with the literature on educational agonism. The second section lays the groundwork for a critique of the way in which education is fetishized, in different ways, by liberals and radicals as a panacea for populist politics. The third section reframes democratic crisis as an enjoyment problem in order to better grasp the relationship between the liberal democratic disavowal of its own irrationality and the structure of right-wing populist enjoyment. The fourth section applies these insights to develop a critical analysis of what is at stake when we explicitly consider the left populist construction of a ‘people’ as an educational task. I conclude by drawing together and summarising the main features and considerations of left populism understood as an education of desire. (shrink)

According to the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, conscious states are just those states that are the object of a suitable higher-order thought to the effect that one is in that state. These higher-order thoughts perform this role by providing subjects with a particular type of _awareness_. However, HOT theorists have tended to offer two alternative formulations of this awareness when stating the basic claims of HOT theory. According to what I call the _state formulation_ of HOT theory, HOTs (...) provide subjects with an awareness of _mental states_, and a mental state is conscious only if the subject is aware of that state. According to what I call the _oneself formulation_ of HOT theory, HOTs provide subjects with an awareness of _themselves as being in a mental state_, and a mental state is conscious only if the subject is aware of themselves as being in that state. In this paper I explore the dialectical significance and legitimacy of HOT theorists’ current practice of employing both formulations. I argue that there is some reason for HOT theorists to adopt the oneself formulation, rather than the state formulation. However, this appears to weaken HOT theory considerably, by abandoning the idea that when our mental states are conscious, we are aware of those states themselves. Against this objection I argue that adopting the oneself formulation does not require abandoning the basic idea lying behind the state formulation and that this is consistent with the reasons for favouring the oneself formulation. (shrink)

The mathematical field of graph theory has recently been used to provide counterexamples to the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. In response to this, it has been argued that appeal to relations between graphs allows the Principle to survive the counterexamples. In this paper, I aim to show why that proposal does not succeed.

In a recent paper in JVI, ‘An Anarchist Interpretation of Marx’s “Ability to Needs” Principle,’ Spafford has argued that: (i) the communist and anarchist traditions share an objection to a particular kind of exchange (which he calls quid pro quo exchange); (ii) the anarchist objection to quid pro quo exchange can be understood as opposition to conditional exchange; (iii) consequently, the objection motivates an opposition to conditional exchange as such (i.e. a commitment to unconditional exchange); and (iv) we can construct (...) a normative justification of this opposition by reference to the value of freedom, given that conditional exchange offers diminish the freedom of the recipients of the offers. In this reply piece I argue that (ii) is importantly mistaken, and that consequently (iii) also fails. Although all quid pro quo exchanges are conditional exchanges, the converse does not hold, and we have reason to believe that there will be instances of conditional exchange that are unobjectionable by the lights of the traditional anarchist and communist objection to such exchange. Consequently, an opposition to all conditional exchange rules out too much. However, I will argue that a suitably modified version of (iv) may nevertheless survive the counterexamples that defeat (ii). (shrink)

Symmetry principles are a central part of contemporary physics, yet there has been surprisingly little metaphysical work done on them. This article develops the Wignerian treatment of symmetries as higher-order laws—metalaws—within a Humean framework of lawhood. Lange has raised two obstacles to Humean metalaws, and the article shows that the account has the resources available to respond to both. It is argued that this framework for Humean metalaws stands as an example of naturalistic metaphysics, able to bring Humeanism into contact (...) with the practice of actual science without giving up on the central denial of necessary connections. (shrink)

To balance radical changes in the built environment that accompany urban renewal, many cities deploy historical design elements to provoke a sense of physical and temporal continuity. By examining the theory and practice of nostalgia in renewal projects, I argue that this strategic deployment of historical signifiers is more complex and normatively problematic than it first appears. Analysing the design and construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards through Walter Benjamin’s theories of cultural production and historical succession, I show (...) the problematic political effect of such image-led regeneration projects. The stadium exemplifies a system of urban and historical design and construction that uses material artifice to make totalizing political claims, deploying specific historical signifiers as a means to silence others. Drawing from Benjamin’s materialist historiography, I conclude with a survey of the resources that remain for the practice of an architecture of memory in light of my critique. (shrink)

I examine the effort that some theorists make to write to, and inspire a new sense of agency in, their readers. I will consider the work of John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, two theorists who attempt to close the gap between political reality and a theoretically informed politics by using their texts to rethink and recreate their reader. By working between a determined past and the possibility of a redeemed future, Dewey and Arendt use their theory to implant a sense (...) that their present readers can become self-aware, free, and potent agents for political change. (shrink)

Scientistic conceptualisations hold to the positivistic positions that science is limitless in its potential representations of material phenomena and that it is the only sure path to knowledge. In recent popular scientific literature, these presuppositions have been reaffirmed to the detriment of both philosophy and theology. This article argues for the contrary position by a meta-analysis of empirical science from a Thomist perspective. Identifying empirical science as limited in its method and bound to the material sphere of being alone, we (...) posit that rather than standing as the sole path to the knowledge of being, empirical science is constrained at its frontiers. It is subsequently contended that far from empirical science having the explanatory ability to respond to all presenting scientific problems in principle, fundamentals without the grasp of the methodology of empirical science exist. To relate the article’s meta-analysis to scientific praxis, physical cosmology – as the most foundational empirical science – is exemplified in the discussion.Keywords: Philosophy; Religion; Science; Scientism; Thomism; Metaphysics; Epistemology. (shrink)

African Philosophy and St Thomas Aquinas have both been taught in African universities, but the engagement between the continent’s indigenous philosophical tradition and the Catholic intellectual tradition’s preeminent strand, has not been thorough. Presupposing that plural philosophical traditions contribute to the search to better understand, this research embarks upon a comparative analysis of the perspectives of the African ubuntu philosophy and Thomist philosophical conceptualisations of human becoming and being. Through analysis of dimensions of both traditions, it is contended that human (...) fulness arises through relationality. It is argued that in centring on the interpersonal encounter and the consequent recognition of another’s being through mutual engagement, these philosophical traditions open to each other. Further, both traditions contribute toward the ontology of personhood in ubuntu and the good of mutual indwelling, respectively. (shrink)

Impact sourcing is the practice of employing socio-economically disadvantaged individuals at business process outsourcing centres to reduce poverty and create secure jobs. One of the pioneers of impact sourcing is Sama, a training-data company that focuses on annotating data for artificial intelligence (AI) systems and claims to support an ethical AI supply chain through its business operations. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at three of Sama’s East African delivery centres in Kenya and Uganda and follow-up online interviews, this article interrogates Sama’s (...) claims regarding the benefits of its impact sourcing model. Our analysis reveals alarming accounts of low wages, insecure work, a tightly disciplined labour management process, gender-based exploitation and harassment and a system designed to extract value from low-paid workers to produce profits for investors. We argue that competitive market-based dynamics generate a powerful force that pushes such companies towards limiting the actual social impact of their business model in favour of ensuring higher profit margins. This force can be resisted, but only through countervailing measures such as pressure from organised workers, civil society, or regulation. These findings have broad implications related to working conditions for low-wage data annotators across the sector and cast doubt on the ethical nature of AI products that rely on this form of AI data work. (shrink)

In his 2010 work, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking, argues that ‘… philosophy is dead’. While not a Philosopher, Hawking provides strong argument for his thesis, principally that philosophers have not taken science sufficiently seriously and so Philosophy is no longer relevant to knowledge claims. In this paper, Hawking’s claim is appraised and critiqued, becoming a meta-philosophical discussion. It is argued that Philosophy is dead, in some sense, due to particular philosophers having embarked on an intellectual path no longer in (...) keeping with the ancient definition of Philosophy. Philosophy as the seeking of wisdom necessarily includes the consideration of findings of other intellectual pursuits, including physical and natural science. While Philosophy has justifiably evolved through its long history, is it unrecognisable in the terms by which it historically defined itself? Seeking consistency, Hawking is critiqued for appearing to practise ‘dead’ Philosophy. Indeed, Hawking’s appeal to multiverse theory and his core discussion of the metaphysical problem of being are philosophical. The question of the death of Philosophy has contemporary relevance for the discipline which is particularly under threat for its survival in the academy, oftentimes assumed to be irrelevant. (shrink)

Arguing in support of Aristotle, Aquinas conceptualised the cognitive functioning of the human as exceeding that of other animals. In its base form, the Thomistic position asserts that the intellective functioning of the human animal is superior to the instinctual operation of the non-human animal. For Aquinas, it is the intellect that determines the enactment of the human will. Thus, if a non-human animal is devoid of intellect, no willing of any action is possible. Consequently, an action of a non-human (...) animal which is humanly perceived as immoral, is in fact morally agnostic because the animal lacks the reasoning capacity to judge the potential action's moral status. Given that Aquinas’ argument centres on the role of reason in determinations of moral status, we seek to determine the status theoria of the Thomistic moral theory in light of contemporary studies into animal cognition. The assertion is made that this particular aspect of Aquinas’ moral theory requires rewriting because reason is evident in animal cognition to a greater extent than Aquinas would have been able to appreciate given his contextual limitations. This presence of reason, we argue, ascribes moral status to some non-human animals, analogous to their human counterparts. However, we will also contend that rather than dismissing Aquinas’ reason-founded ethics, value could be found in retaining a rewritten Thomistic theoretical construction which extends Aquinas’ ethic to include animals apart from the human that are bearers of the faculty of reason. (shrink)

As the ideological constructor of the destruction of colonised peoples and knowledge, Western philosophy must bear its burden for complicity. Decoloniality is amid the discourses of critique contra modernity and its denigration of the colonised. In the South African academy, for instance, much support has been validly rendered to decoloniality, consequently those employing “Western” frameworks should be challenged to constant re-evaluation. Here, the virtues and vices of decoloniality will not be considered. Rather a discernment will be undertaken of the “epistemic (...) worth” of conducting – specifically mediaeval and Western – philosophical research amid calls for the decentring of Western epistemological dominance, within the tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the decolonial milieu. The argument is proffered – from multifold perspectives – that Aquinas, as both pre-modern and pre-colonial, does have relevance to the decolonial academic climate. The case is defended that Arabic philosophers importantly influenced Aquinas’ work, thus, demonstrating his openness to non-Western thought. Furthermore, from an epistemological perspective, it is contended that Aquinas’ placing of the subject at the focal point of adequations to truth by credencing the situatedness of the perceiver, deconstructs modern objectivity, which in itself has caused considerable damage to non-Western epistemologies. Aquinas’ epistemic relevance in this context, it is argued, may contribute to a median between demonstrable science and the multi-layered context of the epistemic subject. (shrink)

We examine the responses of South African multinational enterprises to corruption in African markets in the context of institutional voids. Corruption is a source of uncertainty and additional transactional costs for MNEs and it necessitates a strategic response. The research employs a qualitative study of a sample of MNEs with experience in internationalising into Africa. The results indicate that corruption in African markets is pervasive and closely associated with the institutional voids in these countries. MNEs see themselves as ‘institution takers’ (...) responding to countries’ institutional makeup at the organisational and individual level but fail to fully appreciate their impact on institutions both positively and negatively. Rather MNEs focus on strategic responses at the organisational level to address corruption operationally in the host country. We add to the existing literature by providing a dynamic framework of the complex webs of association between institutions, MNEs and corruption in conditions of economic underdevelopment. The research suggests that MNEs do not need to get caught in a vicious cycle whereby they perpetuate corruption in conditions of underdevelopment and institutional voids but instead can contribute towards a virtuous cycle through which they institutionalise ethical foundations. (shrink)

Donald Price and James Barrell show how a science of human experience can be developed through a strategy that integrates experiential paradigms with methods from the natural sciences.

Many strategies have been proposed to address the supply of bespoke essays and other assignments by companies often described as ‘Essay Mills’ with the act of supply and use being invariably described as ‘contract cheating’. These proposals increasingly refer to the law as a solution in common with other action. In this article, the lead author revisits work undertaken in 2016 as a result of recent legal and extra-legal developments to assess whether the UK Fraud Act (2006) might now be (...) used to tackle some of the activities of the companies involved, by comparing their common practises, and their Terms and Conditions, with the Act. It was previously found that all sites have disclaimers regarding the use of their products but there were some obvious contradictions in the activities of the sites which undermined those disclaimers, for example plagiarism-free guarantees for the work. In this article, we ask and consider the question whether this is still the case having regard to the impact of a change in the law by the UK supreme court and recent action of the UK Advertising Standards Authority. We also consider whether a call for a new offence to be created which specifically targets the undesirable behaviours of these companies is still justified. (shrink)

Towards the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fragment ‘The Triumph of Life’ there are some famous lines which raise most of the questions that will concern me in this essay. Never mind, for the moment, the context: the lines I have in mind are these: “I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, And suddenly my brain became as sand “Where the first wave had more than half erased The track of deer (...) on desert Labrador, Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed “Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore Until the second bursts—so on my sight Burst a new Vision never seen before.—1[…]Two kinds of things are happening here which I want to point out. The first is that even as the poem is attempting to represent the mind as passive and the experience of the mind as an empty succession of events, it is also making a quite contrary attempt to represent the mind as active and the succession as a structure. The lines dramatise how a play of mental events, as they are represented in language, may be reprocessed in such a way that some of them come to be classified as interruptions or breaks in the otherwise meaningful sequence composed by the others. As my first paraphrase suggested, it seems to make sense to recast Shelley’s narrative into the story of deer chased by a wolf, a story which is then interrupted by the wave which bursts on the shore and which threatens the coherence of the story by threatening to efface all sin that the deer have passed across the beach, have crossed the mind. 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Triumph of Life,’ in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers , II. 403-11. The most illuminating reading of these lines is Paul de Man’s in The Rhetoric of Romanticism , pp. 99-100. John Barrell is professor of English at the University of Sussex and author of a number of books on literature and the visual arts, most recently Poetry, Language and Politics . The Infection of Thomas De Quincey and The Birth of Pandora will be published next year. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential–phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of (...) pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of Price and Barrell offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness. (shrink)

LEARNING OBJECTIVES After completing this chapter, you will be able to: Provide a definition of ethics. Explain traditional sources for motivating ethical ...

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential–phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of (...) pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of Price and Barrell offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness. (shrink)

A 21st-century growth in prevalence of extreme right-wing nationalism and social conservatism in Australia, Europe, and America, in certain respects belies the positive impacts of online, new, and alternative forms of global media. Cross-national forms of ‘far-right activism’ are unconfined to their host nations; individuals and organisations campaign on the basis of ethno-cultural separatism, while capitalising on internet-based affordances for communication and ideological cross-fertilisation. Right-wing revolutionary ideas disseminated in this media, to this end, embody politico-cultural aims that can only be (...) understood with attention to their philosophical underpinnings. Drawing on a dataset of articles from the pseudo-news websites, XYZ and The Unshackled, this paper investigates the representation of different rightist political philosophical traditions in contemporary Australia-based far-right media. A critical discourse and content analysis reveal XYZ and TU’s engagement with various traditions, from Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolution, to the European New Right and neo-Nazism. (shrink)

Abstractα/β barrels have an ill‐defined origin. Evidence exists which favours their divergent evolution from a common ancestral barrel and convergent evolution to a stable fold. However, recent sequence and structural information for the flavin oxidase/dehydrogenase family of barrel enzymes indicate that sub‐families of α/β barrels have evolved divergently. The modular fusion of barrel domains with core structures from other gene families has also contributed to the evolution of related but catalytically distinct enzyme molecules within each sub‐family of the flavin oxidases/dehydrogenases. (...) An analysis of the structures and sequences of the flavin oxidases/dehydrogenases has now enabled studies focusing on the evolutionary origins and modular assembly of this important family of proteins to be initiated. (shrink)