Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and (...) increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures. (shrink)

Since 2023, the UK government's response to the “migrant crisis” has revolved around two controversial flagship policies: the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and the detention of migrants aboard a giant barge. In this short article, I examine the colonial and gendered dimensions of the two policies, finding them to be examples of the coloniality of gender. What this indicates, I suggest, is that the purpose of these policies is not merely to deter potential migrants—particularly LGBTQIA+ migrants—but also to (...) create a political narrative that allows the Conservative Party to garner right-wing votes by participating in high-profile culture wars; namely, the debate over transgender rights and the debate over how the UK should reckon with its imperial past. (shrink)

"Well-being," "welfare," "utility," and "quality of life," all closely related concepts, are at the center of morality, politics, law, and economics. Griffin's book, while primarily a volume of moral philosophy, is relevant to all of these subjects. Griffin offers answers to three central questions about well-being: what is the best way to understand it, can it be measured, and where should it fit in moral and political thought. With its breadth of investigation and depth of insight, this work (...) holds significance for philosophers as well as for those interested in political and economic theory and jurisprudence. (shrink)

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Religion, science, and naturalism -- Perception and religious experience -- Panexperientialism, freedom, and the mind-body relation -- Naturalistic, dipolar theism -- Natural theology based on naturalistic theism -- Evolution, evil, and eschatology -- The two ultimates and the religions -- Religion, morality, and civilization -- Religious language and truth -- Religious knowledge and common sense.

Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do the famous arguments of its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that Lewis’s epistemology is among the positions targeted by Sellars. But this is incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered more trenchant (if already familiar) critiques of Lewis’s epistemology. What is original about EPM (...) is that it criticizes empiricist positions like Lewis’s not because of their foundationalism, but because of their psychologism about meaning. Since psychologism turns out to be unacceptable by Lewis’s own lights, EPM has a compelling (if implicit) critique of Lewis to offer after all, one that strikes at the heart of his philosophical system. (shrink)

In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-linguistic, and language departure transitions, and a theory of truth as correct (...) assertibility relative to such semantical rules. On these non-representationalist theories, even though moral statements are expressions of intentions and not fundamentally descriptive, they nevertheless count as assertorically meaningful, and some count as positively true. I further argue that this interpretation is capable not only of explaining Sellars’ explicitly metaethical writings, but also of unifying his scientific realism with his commitment to the ineliminable and indispensable role of the language of intentions: if this linguistic framework does not play an explanatory role, but only an expressive role, this explains both why Sellars’ commitment to it does not contravene his naturalism, as well as why, given the necessity of such language for our practical engagement with the world, the scientific image of humans in the world will only be completed once such language supplements it to enable us to relate practically to it. (shrink)

While C. I. Lewis was traditionally interpreted as an epistemological foundationalist throughout his major works, virtually every recent treatment of Lewis's epistemology dissents. But the traditional interpretation is correct: Lewis believed that apprehensions of "the given" are certain independently of support from, and constitute the ultimate warrant for, objective empirical beliefs. This interpretation proves surprisingly capable of accommodating apparently contrary textual evidence. The non-foundationalist reading, by contrast, simply cannot explain Lewis's explicit opposition to coherentism and his insistence that only apprehensions (...) of the given enable us to answer the regress problem -- and so vindicate the possibility of empirical justification. (shrink)

Addressing God -- Approaching God -- Experiencing God -- Receiving God -- Worshipping God -- Manifesting God.

I take up two questions raised by Luz Christopher Seiberth's meticulous reconstruction of Wilfrid Sellars's theory of intentionality. The first is whether we should regard Sellars as a transcendental phenomenalist in the most interesting sense of the term: as denying that even an ideally adequate conceptual structure would enable us to represent worldly objects as they are in themselves. I agree with Seiberth that the answer is probably yes, but I suggest that this is due not to Sellars's rejection of (...) the Myth of the Given or appeal to image-models (as Seiberth maintains), but to his view of modality as categorial but as absent from the world an sich. The second is whether, as Richard Rorty complained, Sellars's appeal to picturing lands his theory of intentionality in intractable skepticism. Pace Seiberth, I argue that the transcendental role of picturing does not mitigate this problem, and I suggest that Sellars's most fruitful resource for doing so is not his semantic externalism, but his purely pragmatic response to skepticism. (shrink)

Frost has given us good reason to question the universality of existing computational models of reading. Yet, he has not provided arguments showing that all languages share fundamental and invariant reading universals. His goal of outlining the blueprint principles for a universal model of reading is premature. Further, it is questionable whether natural evolution can provide the optimal solutions that Frost invokes.

The 13th-15th centuries were witness to lively and broad-ranging debates about the nature of persons. In this paper, I look at how the uses of ‘person’ in logical/grammatical, legal/political, and theological contexts overlap in the works of 13th-15th century contemplatives in the Latin West, such as Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart, and Catherine of Siena. After explicating the key concepts of individuality, dignity, and rationality, I show how these ideas combine with the contemplative use of first- and second-person perspectives, personification, and introspection (...) to yield a concept of 'person' that both prefigures Locke's classic 17th century definition and deeply influences the development of personalism. (shrink)

In dit boek worden de uitdagingen besproken waarvoor feminisme en vrouwenstudies zich vandaag de dag gesteld zien. In het gedeelte 'Women's Studies and Feminist Practice' wordt de vaak gespannen relatie tussen theorie en praktijk belicht. Aandacht vooral voor de achterdocht binnen de 'traditionele' vrouwenbeweging voor de groeiende macht van de 'academische' vrouwenstudies.

Positive emotions are highly valued and frequently sought. Beyond just being pleasant, however, positive emotions may also lead to long-term benefits in important domains, including work, physical health, and interpersonal relationships. Research thus far has focused on the broader functions of positive emotions. According to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions expand people’s thought–action repertoires and allow them to build psychological, intellectual, and social resources. New evidence suggests that positive emotions—particularly gratitude—may also play a role in motivating individuals to engage in (...) positive behaviors leading to self-improvement. We propose and offer supportive evidence that expressing gratitude leads people to muster effort to improve themselves via increases in connectedness, elevation, humility, and specific negative states including indebtedness. (shrink)

Um die Beziehung zwischen Männern und dem physischen sowie phantasierten Vaginalen zu untersuchen, zielt dieser Beitrag auf die Lokalisierung und Erhellung der Transgender-Schwelle von Cisgender-Männern, statt auf die augenfälligen Phänomene des Transgender-Erlebens zu fokussieren. Indem der Autor das Vaginale als Pendant zum Phallischen postuliert, koppelt er vaginale psychische und verkörperlichte Zustände vom Weiblichen im strengen Sinn ab, um sie, ebenso wie das Phallische, Menschen sämtlicher Gender und biologischen Geschlechter zugänglich zu machen. Dieser Begriff weist über das Konzeptuelle hinaus auf die (...) fleischliche, verkörperlichte Erfahrung vieler Transgender-Männer, die in ganzen, partiellen und/oder temporär »weiblichen« Körpern leben. Es kann auch auf die physio-psychische Realität zahlreicher Cisgender-Männer Anwendung finden. Vorstellung und Diskussion eines schwulen Cisgender-Patienten, der seinen Anus als Vagina erlebt und phantasiert, sind ebenfalls Teil des Beitrags. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and explore some ideas about how factive emotional states and factive perceptual states each relate to knowledge and reasons. This discussion will shed light on the so-called ‘perceptual model’ of the emotions.

The Middles Ages are often portrayed as a time in which people with physical disabilities in the Latin West were ostracized, on the grounds that such conditions demonstrated personal sin and/or God’s judgment. This was undoubtedly the dominant response to disability in various times and places during the fifth through fifteenth centuries, but the total range of medieval responses is much broader and more interesting. In particular, the 13th-15th century treatment of three groups (martyrs, mothers, and mystics - whose physical (...) ‘defects’ were often understood as signs of special connection to God in this life, and who were often represented as retaining these signs in the life to come) challenge standard notions of beauty, disfigurement, and bodily perfection, particularly as the notion is applied to eternal life and our ultimate end. (shrink)

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer (...) a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed. (shrink)

How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s justified belief is true, but (...) only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and ‘‘Gettiering’’ on people’s knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent’s belief is based on ‘‘apparent’’ evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers. (shrink)

Offering a novel and pragmatic perspective, this timely book critically examines the development of a culture of machinist regulation and questions whether this approach is appropriate in an era of rising biological technologies. Adopting an ontological approach, James Griffin considers how current regulatory frameworks favour digital technology and how this may change in the future. Griffin adeptly investigates how regulation can impact the nature of new technologies, especially as biological computing is becoming more commonplace. Chapters provide a wealth (...) of critical analysis, considering cutting-edge technologies such as AI, prosthesis, and biological computing. Griffin outlines a proposed reformative system which focuses on the biological substrate in the creation of cultural works. The book serves to highlight the ever-increasing need for awareness of the importance of biological substrates and for a regulatory system which reflects this. The State of Cultural Biology will be an essential read for academics and students interested in intellectual property law, law and technology, legal philosophy and law's role in society. It will also prove invaluable to policymakers and professionals looking to broaden their knowledge on the regulation of modern technology. (shrink)

Using focus groups, this small-scale, qualitative study investigated the way that students tend to think about religious truth-claims as compared to other types of truth-claim. All the student participants conceived of religious truth-claims as ‘opinions’, to be contrasted with the certain, indisputable ‘facts’ of science. For many students, it was the lack of empirical verification, as well as the existence of disagreement, which meant religious beliefs were relegated to this position. If these findings are generalisable, then there are implications for (...) the ongoing theoretical dispute over the extent to which truth should be a focus in religious education. The tendency for students to see religious claims as subjective lends support for a critical pedagogy that places evaluation of truth centre-stage. The findings also suggest a need for religious education and science teachers to include more reflection on the nature of the scientific method in their schemes of work in order to dispel the myths of unanimity and certainty in science. (shrink)

The phenomenon and implications of stigma have been recognized across many contexts and in relation to many discrete issues or conditions. The notion of spatial stigma has been developed within stigma literature, although the importance and relevance of spatial stigma for rural places and rural people have been largely neglected. This is the case even within fields of inquiry like public and rural health, which are expansively tasked with addressing the socio-structural drivers of health inequalities. In this paper, we argue (...) that developing a better understanding of rural place stigma is critical for addressing contemporary patterns of spatial injustice and health inequalities affecting rural communities globally. Drawing on international literature and examples from the reported experiences of rurally living Australians and news and other media, we present an analysis highlighting the power in rural place stigma. In doing so, we build a case for the relevance and importance of interrogating rural place stigma, especially in the fields of public and rural health, for changing the conditions within—and the broader positioning of—the rural in the public and political landscapes. (shrink)

This article explores the collaborative research of the Nobel laureate Hans Spemann (1869–1941) and the Swiss zoologist Fritz Baltzer (1884–1974) on problems at the intersection of development and heredity and raises more general questions concerning science and politics in Germany in the interwar period. It argues that Spemann and Baltzer’s collaborative work made a significant contribution to the then ongoing debates about the relation between developmental physiology and hereditary studies, although Spemann distanced himself from _Drosophila_ genetics because of his anti-reductionist (...) position. The article analyzes how Spemann framed the issues of heredity in terms of an epigenetic principle in the context of his work on the “organizer,” and it explores the experimental dynamics of research on newt merogones carried out by Baltzer in a methodological development of Spemann’s constriction experiments. Finally, these research attempts are discussed as part of a broader “prehistory” of the mid-twentieth century cell nuclear transplantation experiments, which provided the basis for later animal cloning. (shrink)

According to one understanding of the problem of dirty hands, every case of dirty hands is an instance of moral conflict, but not every instance of moral conflict is a case of dirty hands. So, what sets the two apart? The dirty hands literature has offered widely different answers to this question but there has been relatively little discussion about their relative merits as well as challenges. In this paper I evaluate these different accounts by making clear which understanding of (...) concept distinctness underlies them and which of them is, ultimately, the most plausible one in the case of dirty hands and ordinary moral conflict. In order to do so, I will borrow from the terminology employed in recent debates in the philosophy of evil which have tackled a similar problem to the one at hand, i.e. defining what sets evil apart from ordinary wrongdoing. Here it has been argued that concepts could be distinct in three ways: they can have a quantitative difference, a strong qualitative or a moderate qualitative difference. I conclude that the most convincing definition of dirty hands draws a moderate qualitative distinction between ordinary moral conflict according to which dirty hands are those moral conflicts that involve a serious violation or betrayal of a core moral value. (shrink)

Pragmatist responses to skepticism about empirical justification have mostly been underwhelming, either presupposing implausible theses like relativism or anti-realism, or else showing our basic empirical beliefs to be merely psychologically inevitable rather than rationally warranted. In this paper I defend a better one: a modified version of an argument by Wilfrid Sellars that we are pragmatically warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true, since their likely truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our goal of (...) effective agency. On the version of the argument I defend, the great good for human life of control over our empirical circumstances renders our goal of effective agency reasonable. But only if our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true—and only if we accept that this is so, assuming it as a premise for inference and a guide for action—will the success of our actions be due to our effective agency, not mere luck. Since we’re warranted in taking the necessary means to our reasonable ends, we’re warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are generally justified, and so that skepticism about empirical justification is false. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the role of metaphors in science on the basis of a historical case study. The study explores how metaphors of “genetic information,” “genetic code,” and scripture representations of heredity entered molecular biology and reshaped experimentation during the 1950s and 1960s. Following the approach of the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, I will argue that metaphors are not merely a means of popularization or a specific kind of modeling but rather are representations that can unfold an operational force of their (...) own.While the influence of cybernetics and information theory on molecular biology is well documented in historical analysis throughout recent years, this paper offers new insights into the metaphysical and religious resonances of textual metaphors in the life sciences. The main focus will be on developments in Germany, in particular on the work of the German biochemist Gerhard Schramm. In this historical case study the interaction between metaphors and experimental practices will be discussed. The paper analyzes different phases in the use of metaphors during the 1950s and 1960s: it will explore how the metaphors of a “genetic alphabet” or of “genetic code” developed into a new research program and eventually attained ontological status in the early 1960s. At that time Schramm's use of textual metaphors was reminiscent of nineteenth-century German natural philosophy. In this case, the metaphorical shift shows how the metaphor of a “genetic text” or a “genetic code,” which were central for the emerging molecular biology, drew on older cultural traditions with all of their metaphysical and religious preoccupations. (shrink)

Marx’s concept of bird-freedom or Vogelfreiheit— drawn from German legal history in which it meant “outlaw status” — describes the situation of free labor as “doubly free”: not enslaved as well as landless. The metaphorical valences of his satirical emphasis on the cynicism of the idea of “free labor” returns in many of Marx’s other satirical reworkings of concepts which refer to the state of nature. This essay looks at two such concepts engaged in explaining the process of “primitive accumulation” (...) in Capital, Volume 1: the notion of the idyll (“idyllic relations” or “idyllic proceedings”) and the notion of outlawry as “bird-freedom.” The essay exemplifies the ways in which both moments constitute “natural-historical images,” in Theodor Adorno’s terms: a concept of hybridity, historical texture, and transition that might add to the scholarship on Marx’s philosophy of nature. (shrink)

This essay collides with the aesthetic of wilderness cultivated by the North American retail chain Bass Pro Shops. Through elaborate displays and décor that render each store part rustic lodge, aquarium, amusement park, natural history museum, and hunting simulator, the stores represent the natural world and its inhabitants as abundant resources for human consumption. The stores’ aesthetic is primarily wrought through the arrangement of taxidermied animals. These animals include both traditional wildlife mounts posed in lifelike attitudes as well as animatronic (...) taxidermy that becomes “alive” in response to players’ achievements in a shooting range game. By exploring the stores’ traditional and animatronic taxidermy as well as its conflation of animal and machine, this essay explores the conception of environmental conservation and animal ontology upheld by Bass Pro Shops. (shrink)

This volume collects twenty original essays on the philosophy of film. It uniquely brings together scholars working across a range of philosophical traditions and academic disciplines to broaden and advance debates on film and philosophy. The book includes contributions from a number of prominent philosophers of film including Noël Carroll, Chris Falzon, Deborah Knight, Paisley Livingston, Robert Sinnerbrink, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg. While the topics explored by the contributors are diverse, there are a number of thematic threads that connect (...) them. Overall, the book seeks to bridge analytic and continental approaches to philosophy of film in fruitful ways. Moving to the individual essays, the first two sections offer novel takes on the philosophical value and the nature of film. The next section focuses on the film-as-philosophy debate. Section IV covers cinematic experience, while Section V includes interpretations of individual films that touch on questions of artificial intelligence, race and film, and cinema's biopolitical potential. Finally, the last section proposes new avenues for future research on the moving image beyond film. This book will appeal to a broad range of scholars working in film studies, theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

This article contends that environmental organisations vary in type, scale and purpose in ways that help stewards self-sort into the opportunities that align with their individual motivations and e...