In this article, I argue that that the primary goal of statues honouring public figures is to create and shape a collective identity. The way that these statues further the goal of identity is not by holding up the subjects of the statues as admirable but rather by asserting that the subjects were in some way objectively important and central to some group surrounding the statue. I will look at the defences for keeping statues of and awards named after John (...) A. Macdonald and show that the primary concern is not with defending the character of Macdonald but rather that removing him is ‘erasing history’. These defences are not about defending Macdonald as a person but rather defending a conception of the Canadian identity that requires Macdonald play a central role. Against these defences of Macdonald, I show that the ‘objective history’ case for him and other such similar figures fails. In the particular case of Macdonald, it fails because he was actually not that important for Canadian history. In the general case of negative public figures, I provide a short defence of how group identities are not static and not unchangeably rooted in a single historically based articulation. (shrink)

Is liberal democracy appropriate for East Asia? In this provocative book, Daniel Bell argues for morally legitimate alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy in the region. Beyond Liberal Democracy, which continues the author's influential earlier work, is divided into three parts that correspond to the three main hallmarks of liberal democracy--human rights, democracy, and capitalism. These features have been modified substantially during their transmission to East Asian societies that have been shaped by nonliberal practices and values. Bell points to the (...) dangers of implementing Western-style models and proposes alternative justifications and practices that may be more appropriate for East Asian societies. If human rights, democracy, and capitalism are to take root and produce beneficial outcomes in East Asia, Bell argues, they must be adjusted to contemporary East Asian political and economic realities and to the values of nonliberal East Asian political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism. Local knowledge is therefore essential for realistic and morally informed contributions to debates on political reform in the region, as well as for mutual learning and enrichment of political theories. Beyond Liberal Democracy is indispensable reading for students and scholars of political theory, Asian studies, and human rights, as well as anyone concerned about China's political and economic future and how Western governments and organizations should engage with China. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article advances a novel way of understanding humor and stand-up comedy. I propose that the relationship between the comedian and her audience is understood by way of trust, where the comedian requires the trust of her audience for her humor to succeed. The comedian may hold the trust of the audience in two domains. She may be trusted as to the form of the humor, such as whether she is joking. She may also be trusted as to the (...) content of the joke. This approach has two distinct virtues. The first is that it makes sense of partial successes. These are cases where the humor neither completely succeeds nor fails because the audience does not fully trust the comedian. The second is that it explains intuitions about ethically dubious humor and why certain classes of humor, especially those dealing in racialized and gendered identities, are more readily accepted from humorists of those identities. (shrink)

The rise of China, along with problems of governance in democratic countries, has reinvigorated the theory of political meritocracy. But what is the theory of political meritocracy and how can it set standards for evaluating political progress? To help answer these questions, this volume gathers a series of commissioned research papers from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists. The result is the first book in decades to examine the rise of political meritocracy and what it will (...) mean for political developments in China and the rest of the world. Despite its limitations, meritocracy has contributed much to human flourishing in East Asia and beyond and will continue to do so in the future. This book is essential reading for those who wish to further the debate and perhaps even help to implement desirable forms of political change. (shrink)

In the wake of political evil on a large scale, what does justice consist of? Daniel Philpott takes up this question in Just and Unjust Peace. While scholars have written about many aspects of dealing with past injustice, no general ethic has emerged. Philpott seeks to provide a holistic model that delivers concrete ethical guidelines for societies striving to build peace.

Since their publication, the Muhammad cartoons featured in Jyllands Posten and Charlie Hebdo have become a symbol of free speech and Western values. These cartoons used provocation as a tool to discuss the limits of free speech and the scope of social self-censorship. In a just society, should the possibility of laughter be distributed equally? Should cartoonists and editors only publish jokes that are universally laughable? What is the proper reaction to these kinds of provocative jokes once the possibility of (...) censorship is ruled out in a liberal context? Is counterspeech or even cancellation a legitimate response? (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book, Daniel D. Novotny explores one of the most controversial topics of Suarez's philosophy: "beings of reason." Beings of reason are impossible intentional objects, such as blindness and square-circle.

In the wake of political evil on a large scale, what does justice consist of? Daniel Philpott takes up this question in Just and Unjust Peace.

In every domain of reasoning humans deploy an wide range of intuitive 'theories' about how the world works. So are we alone in trying to make sense of the world by postulating theoretical entities to explain how the world works, or do we share this ability with other species. This is the focus of this new book from Daniel Povinelli.

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modified in light of cognitive neuroscience? _Consciousness and Mental Life_ questions our present approach to the study of consciousness and (...) the way modern discoveries either mirror or contradict understandings reached in the centuries leading up to our own. Daniel N. Robinson does not wage an attack on the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Rather, he provides the necessary historical context to properly evaluate the relationship between issues of consciousness and neuroscience and their evolution over time. Robinson begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. Well-reasoned and thoroughly argued, _Consciousness and Mental Life_ corrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness. (shrink)

In this book, Daniel Shapiro argues that the dominant positions in contemporary political philosophy - egalitarianism, positive rights theory, communitarianism, and many forms of liberalism - should converge in a rejection of central welfare state institutions. He examines how major welfare institutions, such as government-financed and -administered retirement pensions, national health insurance, and programs for the needy, actually work. Comparing them to compulsory private insurance and private charities, Shapiro argues that the dominant perspectives in political philosophy mistakenly think that (...) their principles support the welfare state. Instead, egalitarians, positive rights theorists, communitarians, and liberals have misunderstood the implications of their own principles, which in fact support more market-based or libertarian institutional conclusions than they may realize. Shapiro's book is unique in its combination of political philosophy with social science. Its focus is not limited to any particular country; rather it examines welfare states in affluent democracies and their market alternatives. (shrink)

In this study Daniel Conway shows how Nietzsche's political thinking bears a closer resemblance to the conservative republicanism of his predecessors than to the progressive liberalism of his contemporaries. The key contemporary figures such as Habermas, Foucault, McIntyre, Rorty and Rawls are also examined in the light of Nietzsche's political legacy. _Nietzsche and the Political___ also draws out important implications for contemporary liberalism and feminist thought, above all showing Nietzsche's continuing relevance to the shape of political thinking today.

Epidemiology is a science of disease which specifies rates (illness prevalences, incidences, distributions, etc.). Evolution is a science of life which specifies changes (gene frequencies, generations, forms, function, etc.). Evolutionary Epidemiology is a synthesis of these two sciences which combines the empirical power of classical methods in genetical epidemiology with the interpretive capacities of neo-darwinian evolutionary genetics. In particular, prevalence rates of genetical diseases are important data points when reformulated for the purpose of analysis in terms of their evolutionary frequencies. (...) Traits which exceedprevalences beyond the rates of mutation (in Hardy-Weinberg calculations) or evidence unusualrange of phenotypic reaction are of special interest. This is because traits which did not confer advantages in the environment of evolutionary adaptation cannot accede, through natural selection, to anything but low rates of genomic prevalence.Evolutionary epidemiology is, in all of medicine, of particular promise in ongoing efforts to better understand psychopathology. Many complexities of phenotypic adjustment arise when new developmental demands are placed on an old genome. The new and complex biosocial ecology of human mass society now evokes different phenotypes than those in the prehistorical ecology to which the genome is structurally and functionally better adapted. Some of these new phenotypes are darwinian failures. In this paper, the theoretical implications of evolutionary epidemiology are extended and some tentative points of clinical application (particularly to psychiatry) are offered. (shrink)

A Modern Legal Ethics proposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally. Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients' claims. Next, the book asks what it is like--not psychologically but ethically--to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to (...) cheat on behalf of their clients. However, an ethically profound interest in integrity gives lawyers reason to resist this characterization of their conduct. Any legal ethics adequate to the complexity of lawyers' lived experience must address the moral dilemmas immanent in this tension. The dominant approaches to legal ethics cannot. Finally, A Modern Legal Ethics reintegrates legal ethics into political philosophy in a fashion commensurate to lawyers' central place in political practice. Lawyerly fidelity supports the authority of adjudication and thus the broader project of political legitimacy. Throughout, the book rejects the casuistry that dominates contemporary applied ethics in favor of an interpretive method that may be mimicked in other areas. Moreover, because lawyers practice at the hinge of modern morals and politics, the book's interpretive insights identify--in an unusually pure and intense form--the moral and political conditions of all modernity. (shrink)

Spatial attention and eye-movements are tightly coupled, but the precise nature of this coupling is controversial. The influential but controversial Premotor theory of attention makes four specific predictions about the relationship between motor preparation and spatial attention. Firstly, spatial attention and motor preparation use the same neural substrates. Secondly, spatial attention is functionally equivalent to planning goal directed actions such as eye-movements (i.e. planning an action is both necessary and sufficient for a shift of spatial attention). Thirdly, planning a goal (...) directed action with any effector system is sufficient to trigger a shift of spatial attention. Fourthly, the eye-movement system has a privileged role in orienting visual spatial attention. This article reviews empirical studies that have tested these predictions. Contrary to predictions one and two there is evidence of anatomical and functional dissociations between endogenous spatial attention and motor preparation. However, there is compelling evidence that exogenous attention is reliant on activation of the oculomotor system. With respect to the third prediction, there is correlational evidence that spatial attention is directed to the endpoint of goal-directed actions but no direct evidence that this attention shift is dependent on motor preparation. The few studies to have directly tested the fourth prediction have produced conflicting results, so the extent to which the oculomotor system has a privileged role in spatial attention remains unclear. Overall, the evidence is not consistent with the view that spatial attention is functionally equivalent to motor preparation so the Premotor theory should be rejected, although a limited version of the Premotor theory in which only exogenous attention is dependent on motor preparation may still be tenable. A plausible alternative account is that activity in the motor system contributes to biased competition between different sensory representations with the winner of the competition becoming the attended item. (shrink)

El artículo se propone elucidar la lectura deconstructiva que Derrida lleva a cabo de la filosofía de Marx y, más ampliamente, de los presupuestos metafísicos de la filosofía marxista. Espectros de Marx (1993) funciona como el punto de partida de un análisis histórico y conceptual que rastrea algunas de las principales hipótesis de este libro en publicaciones, entrevistas, cursos y seminarios fechados entre 1964 y 2004. La pregunta que sirve como hilo conductor de este trabajo es cómo interpretar filosófica y (...) políticamente la deconstrucción de la ontología marxista. (shrink)

I outline Rawls's theory of justification, highlighting its philosophical and pragmatic conditions. I argue that the theory has remained essentially unchanged since his earliest methodological writings, and that his recent writings have sought to show how "justice as fairness" can satisfy these conditions, given Rawls's new construal of the "fact of pluralism" which theories of justice designed for modern Western liberal democracies must address. I argue that neither Rawls's revised conception of reflective equilibrium, based on the "fixed points" of such (...) societies' political cultures rather than on individuals' "considered moral judgments" nor the newer notion of "overlapping consensus", succeed in justifying "justice as fairness" according to the terms of Rawls's theory of justification. (shrink)

Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physi- cal architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind’s self-portrait has as a central feature the idea that thoughts cause actions, and that the self is thus an origin of the body’s actions. This self- portrait is (...) reached through a process of inference of apparent mental cau- sation, and it gives rise to the experience that we are consciously willing what we do. Evidence from several sources suggests that this self-portrait may often be a humble and misleading caricature of the mind’s opera- tion—but one that underlies the feeling of authorship and the acceptance of responsibility for action. (shrink)

abstract Assume that some group, A, is under a serious threat from some other group, B. The only way group A can defend itself is by using lethal force against group B, but the standard conditions for using force in self‐defence are not met. Ought group A to avoid the use of force even if this means yielding to an aggressive, evil power? Most people would resist this conclusion, yet given the violation of essential conditions for self‐defence, this resistance is (...) hard to justify. The aim of this paper is to point to an interesting yet unnoticed move made by some philosophers to find a way out of this problem, a move which relies on construing the situation at hand as a tragic dilemma. I show the attractiveness of this solution and argue that in the end it fails. (shrink)

The authors examined how a perceiver’s identification of a target person’s actions covaries with attributions of mind to the target. The authors found in Study 1 that the attribution of intentionality and cognition to a target was associated with identifying the target’s action in terms of high-level effects rather than low-level details. In Study 2, both action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, and in Study 3, they were reduced for a target suffering misfortune. In Study (...) 4, it was again found that action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, but like that for the self or a liked other, positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions, with the reverse being true for disliked others. In Study 5, the authors found that instructing participants to adopt the target’s perspective did not affect mind attribution but did lead to higher level identifications of the.. (shrink)

This chapter sets out an optimistic view of philosophical progress. The key idea is that the historical record speaks in favor of there being progress at least if we are clear about what philosophical problems are, and what it takes to solve them. I end by asking why so many people tend toward a pessimistic view of philosophical progress.

This article explores two consequences of intentionalism. My first line of argument focuses on the impact of intentionalism on the 'hard problem' of phenomenal character. If intentionalism is true, the phenomenal supervenes on the intentional. Furthermore, if physicalism about the intentional is also true, the intentional supervenes on the physical. Therefore, if intentionalism and physicalism are both true, then, by transitivity of supervenience, physicalism about the phenomenal is true. I argue that this transitivity argument is not persuasive, because on any (...) interpretation of its central terms, at least one of its premises is as controversial as its conclusion already is. My second line of argument is about the consequences of intentionalism for the error theory of color perception. I suggest that if intentionalism is true, projectivism must be true also, because under this condition there is no single concept of color that can be used for the qualification of objects as well as for the characterization of experiences. (shrink)

I argue that neutral free logic and existence hedging are incompatible. Primarily, I respond to proposals by James Pryor intended to reconcile the two. Consideration of those proposals will reveal that on any neutral free logic either some existence hedges will entail some undesired existence claims, or they will not entail some desired existence claims.

Mit dem Konzept der Evidenz-basierten Medizin wurde die Verwendungsweise von empirischen Informationen in den Gesundheitswissenschaften stark verändert. Ein grundlegendes Charakteristikum dieses Konzeptes ist die Unterscheidung zwischen empirischen Informationen per se und „Evidenzen“ im Sinne von qualitativ hochwertigeren empirischen Informationen. Dieses Konzept der Evidenzbasierung findet sich zunehmend auch im Kontext der angewandten Ethik. In der internationalen Fachpresse sind in den letzten 5 bis 10 Jahren zunehmend Arbeiten publiziert worden, die den Begriff „Evidenz-basierte Ethik“ in unterschiedlicher Weise verwenden. Um die ethisch akzeptable (...) Verwendungsweise dieses neuen Konzeptes in der Ethik beurteilen zu können, bedarf es seiner systematischen und kritischen Explikation und Analyse.Der Artikel unterscheidet verschiedene deskriptive und normative Dimensionen des Konzeptes einer Evidenzbasierung und stellt diese in einer Systematik vor. Die Problembereiche im Zusammenhang mit den normativen Dimensionen werden an Praxisbeispielen der Evidenz-basierten Medizin dargestellt, um anschließend die methodischen und praxisorientierten Besonderheiten einer Evidenz-basierten Ethik herauszustellen.Die Höherwertigkeit von Evidenzen gegenüber anderen empirischen Informationen impliziert verschiedene normative Dimensionen wie die der Handlungslegitimation. Die Handlungslegitimation durch den Verweis auf Evidenzen wird dann zu einem ethischen Problem, wenn kein Konsens besteht zu der Frage, wann man bei spezifischen empirischen Informationen von Evidenz sprechen sollte und wann nicht. Durch die im Rahmen der empirischen Ethik hauptsächlich verwendeten sozialempirischen Studienansätze und die noch fehlenden Goldstandards zur Bewertung ihrer Qualität, führt die Übertragung des Evidenz-Konzeptes auf die Ethik zu weiteren methodischen und praktischen Problembereichen. Von einer Verwendung des Begriffspaares „Evidenz-basiert“ in der angewandten Ethik ist solange abzuraten, bis diese Problembereiche konsensfähig gelöst wurden. In der Zwischenzeit wäre eine „Informations-kritische“ Ethik zu fordern, deren Aufgabenspektrum in diesem Artikel vorgestellt wird. (shrink)

These free-wheeling, often exhilarating dialogues—which grew out of the acclaimed Carnegie Hall Talks—are an exchange between two of the most prominent figures in contemporary culture: Daniel Barenboim, internationally renowned conductor and pianist, and Edward W. Said, eminent literary critic and impassioned commentator on the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli and Said a Palestinian-American; they are also close friends. As they range across music, literature, and society, they open up many fields of inquiry: the importance of a sense of (...) place; music as a defiance of silence; the legacies of artists from Mozart and Beethoven to Dickens and Adorno; Wagner’s anti-Semitism; and the need for “artistic solutions” to the predicament of the Middle East—something they both witnessed when they brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together. Erudite, intimate, thoughtful and spontaneous, Parallels and Paradoxes is a virtuosic collaboration. (shrink)