How do we deal with difference personally, interpersonally, nationally? Can we weave a cohesive social fabric in a religiously plural society without suppressing differences? This collection of significant essays suggests that to truly honour differences in matters of faith and religion we must publicly exercise and celebrate them. The secular/sacred, public/private divisions long considered sacred in the West need to be dismantled if Canada (or any nation state) is to develop a genuine mosaic that embraces fundamental differences instead of a (...) melting pot that marginalizes. An ethics of difference starts with a recognition of difference, not as deviance or deficit that threatens but as otherness to connect with, cherish, and celebrate. The book begins with the suggestion that our inability to come to terms with social plurality is not fundamentally the fault of religious differences, and that a public/private split inadequately deals with matters of basic difference. It then explores how encouraging people to live out their respective faiths may open new possibilities for respectful, honourable, and just negotiations of contemporary dilemmas arising out of the multicultural fabric of Canadian life. Towards an Ethics of Community introduces readers to some of the most challenging and divisive dilemmas we face in this increasingly pluralistic, postmodern world — issues such as family and domestic violence, Aboriginal rights, homosexuality and public policy, and female genital mutilation. This is a book truly global in scope and significance. (shrink)

Essays devoted to the work of the late Neil Wilson, Canadian philosopher and contributor to the field of semantic analysis that emerged from the fusion of logic, pragmatism, and ontology. Many of the essays in this volume take their initial inspiration from Wilson's seminal work Substances Without Substrata.

Mr. Mathien asks for evidence that there is Canadian philosophy in a special sense. He is not concerned with questions about whether people who were Canadians, or lived out much or most of their working lives in Canada, wrote philosophy which deserves to be taken seriously. Rather, he asks whether what has gone on in Canada by way of philosophy can be assembled in such a way as to make a coherent discipline.

The title of my paper may lead the reader to expect an account of the content of Canadian philosophy, as seen from outside Canada. This is not my intention. In fact, I shall say very little indeed about the content of Canadian philosophy. What I shall offer, rather, is an apology for Canadian philosophy. The apology, needless to say, will not be apologetic; it will be an apologia, a clearing of the ground for a (...) position. And the apology itself will be cosmopolitan, having a world-wide perspective. (shrink)

I ask whether we need African Canadian philosophy and attempt to provide an answer by considering a series of other questions that can be understood as alternative versions of the initial question. I ask (1) whether we need African Canadian philosophers; (2) whether we need philosophy focused on the African Canadian experience; (3) whether we already have African Canadian philosophy; (4) whether anybody of any background can do African Canadian philosophy; and (...) (5) what African Canadian philosophy will do for us. I conclude that we do need African Canadian philosophy. (shrink)

This is a critical review of In the Agora: The Public Face of Canadian Philosophy. It argues that this book does not adequately represent the public face of Canadian philosophy, though it contains some first-rate contributions.

Canadian theorists and philosophers are recognized internationally for their contributions to normative debates about citizenship, multiculturalism, and nationalism. The superb essays collected here reflect a broad range of contemporary political and philosophical issues: liberalism and citizenship; equality, justice, and gender; minority rights and identity; nationalism and self-determination; and the history of political philosophy.

This is a collection of Canadian legal decisions, primarily from the Supreme Court of Canada, along with international cases that have bearing on Canadian law. The selected cases raise and respond to current and controversial issues in political and legal philosophy. Cases have been edited to present key legal principles and methods of judicial reasoning in action, showing not only what was decided but also how the decisions were made. Topics include: constitutional law, fundamental freedoms, equality rights, (...) civil and criminal responsibility, and sovereignty. This new fifth edition adds over two dozen new cases, including new sections on Indigenous issues and international law. A helpful glossary of common legal terms has also been added as an appendix. (shrink)

Canadian Environmental Philosophy is the first collection of essays to take up theoretical and practical issues in environmental philosophy today, from a Canadian perspective. The essays cover various subjects, including ecological nationalism, the legacy of Grey Owl, the meaning of “outside” to Canadians, the paradigm shift from mechanism to ecology in our understanding of nature, the meaning and significance of the Anthropocene, the challenges of biodiversity protection in Canada, the conservation status of crossbred species in the (...) age of climate change, and the moral status of ecosystems. This wide range of topics is as diverse and challenging as the Canadian landscape itself. Given the extent of humanity's current impact on the biosphere – especially evident with anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing mass extinction – it has never been more urgent for us to confront these environmental challenges as Canadian citizens and citizens of the world. Canadian Environmental Philosophy galvanizes this conversation from the perspective of this place. (shrink)

An intriguing work that considers the shared tradition of Canadian political philosophy.

This is a collection of Canadian legal decisions, mostly from the highest court of the land, that raise and respond to central issues in political and legal philosophy and social ethics. All the issues raised by these cases are current and controversial. They include: the scope of judicial review and legitimate powers of the courts; separation of powers; the nature and scope of rights of speech, association, Aboriginal rights, and legal protections in criminal prosecution; equality and its pursuit (...) in a free and democratic society; autonomy and its protection; the nature of legal responsibility in criminal and tort law; and legitimate punishment. This edition takes into account the many changes that have occurred in our court's interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Twelve new cases have been added, as has a new section on "Group Self-Determination" that takes into account important changes in Aboriginal rights. Many of the cases from the previous edition have been re-edited and slightly expanded, with "follow up" cases included to reflect how they are now interpreted. (shrink)

A traditional task of epistemology is to establish and defend systematic standards that must be met in order for us to have knowledge or justified beliefs. A "naturalized epistemology" tries to arrive at such standards through an empirical investigation into how we interact with our fellows and the world around us, what we seek in these activities, and the particular ways in which we can and cannot succeed. This approach is a radical departure from tradition because its means of investigation (...) is empirical. Nevertheless, since its inception three decades ago, this style of epistemology has become a powerful trend in contemporary theory of knowledge. This collection breaks new ground in extending the insights and methodology of naturalized epistemology to the subject of moral knowledge and moral theory. The essays are divided between two overarching themes. One is the so-called fact-value distinction. How can an empirical study of knowledge hope to address the normative questions about how we should reason about moral matters, how we should live morally? The other is the relation of practical moral know-how to moral discourse. Can the biological underpinning of morality explain most of its central features or is moral discourse essential to our understanding of the cognitive dimensions of moral experience? (shrink)

Whatever the original intent, the introduction of the term 'thought experiment' has proved to be one of the great public relations coups of science writing, For generations of readers of scientific literature, the term has planted the seed of hope that the fragment of text they have just read is more than mundane. Because it was a thought experiment, does it not tap into that infallible font of all wisdom in empiricist science, the experiment? And because it was conducted in (...) thought, does it not miraculously escape the need for the elaborate laboratories and bloated budgets of experimental science? These questions in effect pose the epistemological problem of thought experiments in the sciences: Thought experiments are supposed to give us information about our physical world. From where can this information come? One enticing response to the problem is to imagine that thought experiments draw from some special source of knowledge of the world that transcends our ordinary epistemic resources. My purpose in this paper. (shrink)

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depend- ing on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Derek Parfit which I will paraphrase as follows.

In their History of Canadian philosophy, The Faces of Reason, Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott introduce the concept “philosophical federalism” to describe a tendency shared by many of the early Canadian idealists, a willingness to attempt to understand and accommodate philosophical positions opposed to their own. In this paper I wish to examine the relationship this concept bears to another one, which many still regard as merely an Utopian ideal, that of world federalism.

The Canadian health care system is a publicly fundedsystem based on the philosophy that health is a right,not a commodity. The implementation of thisperspective is hampered by the fact that the CanadianConstitution makes health care a matter of provincialjurisdiction, while most taxing powers lie in thehands of the federal government. Further problemsarise because of Canada's geographic nature and a moveto regionalization of provincial health careadministration. The issue is compounded byrecent developments in reproductive technologies,aboriginal health, changes in consent law, (...) etc. (shrink)

This article examines the possibility of establishing a Department of Peace (DOP) as a Department of the Government of Canada. The topic has been introduced in Parliament twice, as Bill C-447 in 2009 and as Bill C-373 in 2011, without any further actions beyond the formal First Reading. The introduction of the bills could only happen on the basis of significant support among Canadians. At present efforts to introduce the DOP continue, although in somewhat muted form. Based largely on oral (...) interviews, this article assesses the potential for establishing a DOP in the context of the Canadian peace tradition as well as global developments. It concludes that a DOP has great potential to move the peace agenda forward but that, in view of the priorities of the current government and the general mood in Canadian society, it is not realistic to expect a DOP to be implemented at present. (shrink)

Gregor Sebba's monumental Bibliographia Cartesiana; A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature 1800-1960 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) is the basic bibliographical tool of pre-1960 Descartes scholarship. While somewhat weak in its coverage of twentieth century Anglo-American analytical literature on Descartes, it is outstanding ic its coverage of continental scholarship. Willis Doney's "Bibliography," in his Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1967), largely rectifies Sebba’s lack of coverage of pre-1960 analytical work on Descartes. Subsequent to Doney's 1967 bibliography, (...) there have been several useful bibliographical updates, including the excellent "Bulletin Cartésien," published annually in the Archives de Philosophie. However, Vere Chappell and Willis Doney's Twenty-Five Years of Descartes Scholarship, 1960-1984: A Bibliography (forthcoming, New York: Garland, 1987) promises to become the definitive update of Sebba. The present bibliography is designed to supplement the above bibliographies by listing Canadian and American dissertations on Descartes and Cartesianism from 1865 through 1984. It lists dissertations alphabetically by author and provides locations in Dissertations Abstracts as well as University Microfilms order numbers, whenever available. (shrink)

This paper provides a history of more than a century of efforts to establish and maintain a homegrown Canadian sugar supply – a twentieth-century version of what Eric Williams called the ‘war of the two sugars’, or the global competition between sugar beet and cane. To resolve beet sugar’s so-called ‘labour problem’, the industry has collaborated with the Canadian state to produce new classes of temporary workers, mobilising incarcerated Japanese Canadians, migrant Indigenous families, and Mexican and Caribbean workers (...) employed through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. At the same time, the sugar industry has sought to refine itself of the racialised workers upon whom it relies by promoting the figure of the white Canadian worker. The Canadian ‘war of the two sugars’ has been fought through the stratification of the labour force along the lines of citizenship, resulting in the production of unique racial forms. (shrink)

In the last two decades, the philosophy of criminal law has undergone a vibrant revival in Canada. The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has given the Supreme Court of Canada unprecedented latitude to engage with principles of legal, moral, and political philosophy when elaborating its criminal law jurisprudence. Canadian scholars have followed suit by paying increased attention to the philosophical foundations of domestic criminal law. Because of Canada's leadership in international criminal law, both at (...) the level of the International Criminal Court and of specific war crimes tribunals, they have also begun to turn their attention to international criminal law per se. This collection seeks to bring all these Canadian voices together for the first time, and evidence the fact that criminal law theory is no longer to be associated exclusively with the older British, German and American traditions. The topics covered include questions of philosophical methodology, the legitimate scope of domestic and international criminalization, rationales for criminal law defences in both domestic and international law, the philosophical underpinnings of specific crimes and forms of joint responsibility, as well as the theorization of criminal procedure and evidence law. ENDORSEMENTS "In continental Europe, academic commentary on the criminal law has long manifested large philosophical ambitions. Less so in common-law countries, where the dominance of jury trial and the piecemeal development of case-law, together with the famously robust attitudes of common lawyers, have militated against detailed philosophical engagement with doctrine. Over the last 20 years or so, however, new generations of philosophically-literate lawyers and legally-informed philosophers have overcome the historic resistance. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in Canada, where the common law and civilian traditions meet. In 'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory', François Tanguay-Renaud and James Stribopoulos have joined with 14 talented Canadian colleagues to showcase the tremendous breadth and depth of their contemporary national contribution to the subject. Ranging across topics as diverse as emergency, obscenity, and insanity, these essays - without exception insightful and penetrating -set a high standard for the rest of us to aspire to.'' John Gardner, University of Oxford "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory' is an excellent collection of essays demonstrating the vigour, creativity and range of Canadian criminal justice scholarship. It covers a wide range of problems and issues both in the domestic and the international context. Core questions are examined in depth and new questions are brought to the fore. I recommend it very highly to criminal lawyers and philosophers of the criminal law." Professor Victor Tadros, University of Warwick "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory 'is packed with outstanding contributions from criminal law theorists who are among the best not only in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world. Broad and deep in its coverage, the collection offers fresh approaches to a wide range of cutting-edge issues in the field. It provides a resource readers will come back to repeatedly." Stuart Green, Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L Jacobs Scholar, Rutgers University. (shrink)

One of the leading explanations for Canadian banking stability through the global financial crisis of 2007–08 is the Concentration-Stability Hypothesis (CSH), according to which the oligopoly of Canadian finance stabilised the credit system by cushioning it with above-average profits. These provided a buffer against fragility and incentives against excessive risk-taking. In this article, I critically examine CSH and show that classical Marxian analysis more effectively illuminates Canadian banking stability. I demonstrate that robust corporate profitability and capital accumulation (...) before the crisis strengthened the balance sheets of the banks and supported them through those turbulent years. Thus, financial stability is linked explicitly to broader economic stability, and the latter is linked to the profitability of business enterprise. (shrink)

This short review examines the work of four Canadian scholars addressing a variety of questions about criminal responsibility. The essays under review are a small part of a recent collection of essays entitled “Rethinking Criminal Law Theory: New Canadian Perspectives in the Philosophy of Domestic, Transnational, and International Criminal Law.”.

Is it possible to design a forest policy that satisfies ethical and environmental concerns and is acceptable to business, labour and First Nations representatives? What is the best path through the tangle of ethical issues surrounding the collapse of the east coast fishery? What sort of obligations does a rich nation such as Canada have to satisfy the claims of global environmental justice? These are the sorts of issues in applied ethics that are tackled in this collection of essays, the (...) vast majority of which have been written especially for this volume. It is the first Canadian collection of its kind. The book is divided in to sections detailing with such topics as the environment and the economy; ethical issues relating to non-human animals; issues of gender; and issues relating to native peoples. Most of the authors are philosophers, though specialists in geography, geology, and the social sciences are also among the contributors. Frequent reference is made to theoretical ethical concerns, but the focus throughout is on applied ethics, and a variety of case studies are included. (Examples include essays on animal rights and the case of native hunters; surface mining in Northern Ontario, the Quebec arctic; and fishing communities in the Maritimes.) Comparisons are frequently drawn to policies and ethical questions arising in other countries-most prominently the United States. (shrink)