Trinucleotide repeat expansions are now a well‐established mutational mechanism in human genetic disease. An unstable CAG repeat is known to be responsible for three neurodegenerative disorders: Huntington's disease, spinal and bulbar musclar atrophy and spinocerebellar ataxia type 1. Similarities in the genetics of these diseases, the size of the repeat expansions and the position of the unstable repeat within the gene (when known) suggest a common basis to the observed phenotypes. The cloning of two regions at which chromosome breakage can (...) be induced (FRAXA and FRAXE) has in each case uncovered an unstable CG‐rich triplet repeat which becomes methylated when fully expanded. In addition to these two classes of mutation, the presence of an expanded CTG repeat in the 3′ untranslated region of a protein kinase causes myotonic dystrophy. The size of the respective expansions, repeat stability, mutational origins and possible mechanisms of action are discussed. (shrink)

Glutamine repeat expansion has been established as the mutation underlying five inherited neurodegenerative diseases. The mechanism by which this apparently universal mutation, in ubiquitously expressed proteins, causes highly selective neurodegeneration is unknown. The proteins containing the glutamine expansions are otherwise unrelated and likely to have different functions. Two recently published papers(1,2) provide evidence of a conformational change occurring in polyglutamine expansions, which may allow novel interactions and is consistent with a toxic gain‐of‐function hypothesis. HAP1, a protein that interacts with huntingtin (...) (Huntington's disease protein), has an expression profile that intriguingly mirrors the selective neurodegeneration seen in Huntington's disease(2). (shrink)

Gillian Brock develops a model of global justice that takes seriously the moral equality of all human beings notwithstanding their legitimate diverse identifications and affiliations. She addresses concerns about implementing global justice, showing how we can move from theory to feasible public policy that makes progress toward global justice.

Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime 'other' of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

As global business operations expand, managers need more knowledge of foreign cultures, in particular, information on the ethics of doing business across borders. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to share the Islamic perspective on business ethics, little known in the west, which may stimulate further thinking and debate on the relationships between ethics and business, and to provide some knowledge of Islamic philosophy in order to help managers do business in Muslim cultures. The case of Egypt illustrates some (...) divergence between Islamic philosophy and practice in economic life. The paper concludes with managerial implications and suggestions for further research. (shrink)

Despite a predominantly digital, 21st century music production landscape, analogue hardware professional audio technologies persist. In the discoursal throes of the leading online audio technology message forum Gearslutz, such technologies are routinely objectified, sexualized, fetishized and socialized into gear. Situated in a contemporary critical, interdisciplinary framework of fetish, masculinity and sexuality studies, this research interrogates how audio technologies manufactured and intended for music production contexts become sexy. Applying a mixed-mode methodology, including an intensive discourse, image and material-semiotic analysis of an (...) ‘epic’ sexy gear thread, we collated extensive data about technological fetishization. Sexy gear discourse articulates themes of voyeurism, acquisition, control and animation – linking the fetish value of technological objects and their connoisseurship with the erotic potential of sexualized objects. Such discourses ultimately serve to maintain social order, and become sites for performing the maintenance work of hegemonic masculine formations. This research provides new insights into how hegemonic masculinities depend upon the organization of online and offline sociability around fetishized material objects. Furthermore, our findings align with those of current scholarship focused on representational politics of technoculture. (shrink)

Many of the most skilled and educated citizens of developing countries choose to emigrate. How may those societies respond to these facts? May they ever legitimately prevent the emigration of their citizens? Gillian Brock and Michael Blake debate these questions, and offer distinct arguments about the morality of emigration.

Resumen En el presente estudio se aborda la descripción de la semántica de los marcadores evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que en el marco de la teoría de la relevancia (TR). Tomando como punto de partida el análisis que Albelda, M. (2018). ¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. Rilce, 34.3, 1179–1214. traza de ambos evidenciales en un corpus oral, se realizó un estudio tanto cuantitativo como cualitativo de (...) los patrones y el rango de interpretaciones de cada expresión en una muestra de géneros escritos formales procedentes del Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). Los resultados cuantitativos mostraron algunas diferencias con respecto a los obtenidos por Albelda, M. (2018). ¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. Rilce, 34.3, 1179–1214: por lo visto es principalmente inferencial y, en menor medida, reportativo en la escritura formal. En contraste con los géneros orales, tiende a introducir inferencias genéricas, y en ocasiones también precede conjeturas. Se alinea con el parámetro de la objetividad, permitiendo al emisor mostrar una menor implicación hacia la evidencia, así como un mayor compromiso epistémico hacia la fiabilidad de la información. Se ve que, por el contrario, es generalmente un marcador inferencial, tanto en géneros escritos como orales. Se emplea, principalmente, para encabezar inferencias conjeturales. Con se ve que, el emisor muestra una mayor implicación y subjetivización, y un menor compromiso epistémico hacia la evidencia que se introduce en el discurso. Los diferentes patrones de comportamiento discursivo exhibidos por ambos evidenciales pueden explicarse en el marco de la teoría argumentativa del razonamiento (Mercier, H. y Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34.2, 57–74; Mercier H. y Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.). Por lo visto y se ve que tienden a introducir, respectivamente, conclusiones intuitivas y reflexivas que deben ser verificadas y aceptadas por la audiencia. Se ve que apunta, generalmente, a la activación de los mecanismos cognitivos de vigilancia epistémica y lectura de la mente, mientras que por lo visto tiende a desencadenar los procesos de vigilancia epistémica y de razonamiento. (shrink)

Some writers object to logical pluralism on the grounds that logic is normative. The rough idea is that the relation of logical consequence has consequences for what we ought to think and h...

By executive order, the US adopted an immigration policy that looks remarkably similar to a Muslim ban, and threatened to deport long-settled residents, such as the so-called Dreamers. Our defunct refugee system has not dealt adequately with increased refugee flows, forcing desperate people to undertake increasingly risky measures in efforts to reach safe havens. Meanwhile increased migration flows over recent years appear to have contributed to a rise in right-wing populism, apparently driving phenomena such as Brexit and Trumpism. In this (...) original and insightful book Gillian Brock offers answers and tools that assist us in evaluating current migration policy and in helping to determine which policies may be permissible and which are normatively indefensible. She offers a comprehensive framework for responding to the many challenges which have recently emerged, and for delivering justice for people on the move along with those affected by migration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 635-655 [Access article in PDF] The Mystery of Truth: Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's Enlightened Mysticism David Bates "... what truth! and what error!" --Goethe on Saint-Martin 1It is hardly surprising that Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), the philosophe inconnu of late Enlightenment Europe, remains almost completely unknown outside of the marginalized and exotic disciplines of esoterism, theosophy, and mysticism. Although influential in (...) certain circles, Saint-Martin failed to penetrate the mainstream of Enlightenment thought, and what influence he did have in philosophy was largely felt outside of this period altogether, revealing itself in figures such as Maistre, 2 Lamartine, 3 and German Romantics like Franz von Baader. 4 In his own lifetime Saint-Martin was met with incredulity by the forces of rationalism. Voltaire was given a copy of Saint-Martin's 1775 text Des erreurs et de la vérité by a friend of d'Alembert. Voltaire later commented to the mathematician, "I don't believe anyone has ever printed anything more absurd, [End Page 635] more obscure, more crazy, and more stupid." 5 In the Tableau de Paris, Mercier described Saint-Martin and his martinist followers as a sect which turned its back on the paths opened up by sound physics, chemistry, and all natural history in order "to run headlong into an invisible world only they perceived." Saint-Martin taught that the objects we see around us are only "fantastic and deceptive images" and that the truth lies precisely where we cannot see it, Mercier explained. "Physical experiences," the cornerstone of the dominant sensationalist doctrine, were for the martinists only "errors," an "eternal source of folly and deception," wrote Mercier. 6 One review of Saint-Martin's works described their effect as analogous to that of a "pyramid covered in hieroglyphs, erected by an unknown man in a public square," in other words, completely mystifying. 7 The revolutionary Barnave would link martinism with all the other "metaphysical follies," which were, he believed, the result of an overly speculative tendency in eighteenth-century thought. 8For his part Saint-Martin rejected what he considered to be the anti-spiritual tendency of Enlightenment thought. Responding (as a mature student) to the professor Garat, one of the idéologue followers of Condillac, at the École normale in 1795, Saint-Martin wrote: I always admire how you protect youself from materialism by endorsing... the teachings of Condillac. Although I read little, I have just gone through (very quickly, it is true) his Essai sur les origines des connaissances humaines and his Traité des sensations. Whether I have poorly grasped it, or I haven't your secret, I have come across almost no passages which do not repel me; and, I can say, have not encountered one which attracts me. His statue, for example... seems to be a mockery of nature... For me, each of the author's ideas appears to be an attack against man, a veritable homicide. 9Mystic thought, it seems, must oppose Enlightenment. At best, mysticism during the period of Enlightenment will be seen as its "underside" 10 or as the [End Page 636] preparation for coming anti-Enlightenment Romantic doctrines. 11 Indeed, the end of the Enlightenment in France saw a marked interest in esoteric thought and a mystic sensibility. 12 However, the attempt to link mysticism and Enlightenment has almost always been a critical attempt to discover the "superstitious" core of eighteenth-century rationalist thought. In this perspective the study of mystic thought in its own terms can only have antiquarian value, for the mystic approach to truth is, it is claimed, always in the form of a secret, revealed knowledge that can never withstand disciplined analysis. Saint-Martin finds his way into history as either a footnote in large books on Romantic thinking, or as the protaganist in largely incomprehensible ones examining esoteric thought. 13Here, I do not want to claim that Saint-Martin should be "included" in the Enlightenment, but a sympathetic reading of this complex... (shrink)

Between Feminism and Materialism is a bold attempt to make sense of the relationship between feminist theory and capitalism. Addressing a number of philosophical problems that have engaged feminists over the last few decades - universals and reason, nature and essentialism, identity and non-identity, sex and gender, power and patriarchy, local and global - this innovative book breaks through feminist waves and explains the paradoxes of feminist theory by demonstrating the on-going relevance of dialectics and the concepts of exploitation, ideology, (...) and reification. Drawing on first, second and third 'waves' of feminist theory, this exciting combination of existentialism, phenomenology and critical theory delivers a problem-based, micro-political and coalitional feminism ready to respond to the challenges presented by our thoroughly modern times. (shrink)

The prevalence of academic dishonesty is a matter of considerable concern for institutions of higher education everywhere. We explored students’ perceptions of academic dishonesty using Q methodology, which provides insights that are different from those obtained through surveys or interviews. South African students ranked 48 statements, giving reasons why students cheat, on an 11-column grid, anchored by strongly agree and strongly disagree. Q factor analysis was used to identify groups of individuals who share the same perspective. The three perspectives that (...) emerged viewed academic dishonesty as moral transgressions, pressure transgressions, or confused transgressions. These suggest different approaches to addressing the issue. (shrink)

The analytic/synthetic distinction looks simple. It is a distinction between two different kinds of sentence. Synthetic sentences are true in part because of the way the world is, and in part because of what they mean. Analytic sentences - like all bachelors are unmarried and triangles have three sides - are different. They are true in virtue of meaning, so no matter what the world is like, as long as the sentence means what it does, it will be true. -/- (...) This distinction seems powerful because analytic sentences seem to be knowable in a special way. One can know that all bachelors are unmarried, for example, just by thinking about what it means. But many twentieth-century philosophers, with Quine in the lead, argued that there were no analytic sentences, that the idea of analyticity didn't even make sense, and that the analytic/synthetic distinction was therefore an illusion. Others couldn't see how there could fail to be a distinction, however ingenious the arguments of Quine and his supporters. -/- But since the heyday of the debate, things have changed in the philosophy of language. Tools have been refined, confusions cleared up, and most significantly, many philosophers now accept a view of language - semantic externalism - on which it is possible to see how the distinction could fail. One might be tempted to think that ultimately the distinction has fallen for reasons other than those proposed in the original debate. -/- In Truth in Virtue of Meaning, Gillian Russell argues that it hasn't. Using the tools of contemporary philosophy of language, she outlines a view of analytic sentences which is compatible with semantic externalism and defends that view against the old Quinean arguments. She then goes on to draw out the surprising epistemological consequences of her approach. (shrink)

This paper points out a tension between Agustín Rayo's criteria for singulartermhood and his explicit views on the status of Hybrid Identities, that is, identity statements that use singular terms from two different Systems of Representation, such as "7=Julius Caesar" or more suggestively "I am b" where "b" is a singular term referring to my brain. It argues that non-trivial Hybrid Identities are common and important in philosophy and elsewhere, and it suggests a friendly alternative that involves treating Hybrid Identities (...) on the model of Rayo's "Just Is" statements. The last section of the paper points out that even this friendly alternative has counterintuitive consequences when combined with the metaphysical conventionalism that Rayo finds attractive, when it comes to questions of personal identity over time. (shrink)

Logical monists and pluralists disagree about how many correct logics there are; the monists say there is just one, the pluralists that there are more. Could it turn out that both are wrong, and that there is no logic at all?

Take a correct sequent of formal logic, perhaps a simple logical truth, like the law of excluded middle, or something with premises, like disjunctive syllogism, but basically a claim of the form \.Γ can be empty. If you don’t like my examples, feel free to choose your own, everything I have to say should apply to those as well. Such a sequent attributes the properties of logical truth or logical consequence to a schematic sentence or argument. This paper aims to (...) answer the question of how beliefs in such attributions are justified, on both its descriptive and normative interpretations; I aim to say when we generally take ourselves to be justified in forming such beliefs, and to make it plausible that beliefs formed this way really are justified.We can ask such questions about many domains but there are special difficulties for answering them in logic. Some of the difficulties stem from the fact that logic is thought t.. (shrink)

In the thousand years from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and Reformation of the Sixteenth century the discussion of the great questions of philosophy and religion was intense. Does God exist? What is he like? What is the purpose of human life and how does God show concern for the future of mankind? This is an introduction to the debates which did more than anything else to transform the ancient into the modern world of thought.

Purpose Underlying much recent development in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) is a dependence on the labour of precarious crowdworkers via platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. These platforms have been widely critiqued for their exploitative labour relations, and over recent years, there have been various efforts by academic researchers to develop interventions aimed at improving labour conditions. The aim of this paper is to explore US-based crowdworkers’ views on two proposed interventions: a browser plugin that detects automated quality (...) control “Gold Question” (GQ) checks and a proposal for a crowdworker co-operative. Design/methodology/approach The authors interviewed 20 US-based crowdworkers and undertook a thematic analysis of collected data. Findings The findings indicate that US-based crowdworkers tend to have negative and mixed feelings about the GQ detector, but were more enthusiastic about the crowdworker co-operative. Originality/value Drawing on theories of precarious labour, this study suggests an explanation for the findings based on US-based workers’ objective and subjective experiences of precarity. The authors argue that for US-based crowdworkers “constructive” interventions such as a crowdworker co-operative have more potential to improve labour conditions. (shrink)

The Broken Middle offers a startlingly original rethinking of the modern philosophical tradition and fundamentally rejects the anti-philosophy and anti-theory of post-modernity. Extending across the disciplines from philosophy to theology, Judaica, law, social and political theory, literary criticism, feminism and architecture, this book stakes itself on a renewed potential for sustained critique. Against the grain of much contemporary thought, this work of criticism offers the reader a way beyond the spurious alternatives of "totalization" or acknowledgement of the "other". The Broken (...) Middle expounds the phenomenology of the diremption of law and ethics. By reconstructing the suppressed political history of modernity, it shows that contemporary thought belongs to a tradition which has become ancient. Following this drama in the configuration of anxiety of beginning, equivocation of the ethical, and agon of authorship, the logos opens out of the pathos of the concept. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 83-105 [Access article in PDF] Does Malebranche Need Efficacious Ideas? The Cognitive Faculties, the Ontological Status of Ideas, and Human Attention Susan Peppers-Bates But whatever effort of mind I make, I cannot find an idea of force, efficacy, of power, save in the will of the infinitely perfect Being. Malebranche, Elucidation 15 One of the signatures of 17th century rationalists (...) is their replacement of the Scholastics's dependence on the deliverances of the senses with a dependence on the deliverances of the intellect as the key to gaining knowledge.1 Correct use of the intellect leading to freedom from the passions and to certain knowledge figures prominently in the works of Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes's Meditations uses skeptical doubt to withdraw the mind from the senses, and his reliance on the meditative genre not only reveals to his readers the intellect as a distinct source of knowledge, but also trains them to use properly their will or faculty of judgment. Commentators have argued persuasively that overthrowing the sense-based epistemology and metaphysics of the Aristotelians depended on "discovering" the primacy of one's intellect over the senses, and using the deliverances of the mind to establish solid foundations for a new metaphysics and epistemology.2 Indeed, [End Page 83] outlining the proper use of the mind's faculties arguably lay at the basis of the Cartesian program in particular. This importance can be seen in Arnauld and Nicole's influential Port-Royal Logic, which aimed at training its readers in the proper use of the intellect.3Few would question Nicolas Malebranche's inclusion in the rationalist tradition.4 For while Malebranche famously takes ideas out of the Cartesian mind and transports them to God's—thus privileging the divine over the natural light—he shares Descartes's belief that our intellect, not our senses, holds the key to metaphysical truths such as the essence of matter, the mind-body distinction, and the existence of God.5 Yet, recently, Nicholas Jolley has contended that Malebranche's later commitment to "efficacious ideas" undermines his earlier belief in the power of the cognitive faculties: he believes that Malebranche abandons his view that the mind makes "real use" of the intellect to know intelligible objects.6 Jolley's position builds upon Alquié and Robinet's claims that around 1694-95 Malebranche moved from a vision "in" God to a vision "by" God. Now God's ideas act on and modify the soul with both sensations and intellectual concepts, rather than the human intellect contemplating ideas in the Divine Reason.7Alquié and Robinet argue that Malebranche, pushed by the battles with Arnauld and Régis over the status of ideas, introduced the language of "efficacious" ideas to explain how the union of the human and the divine mind is supposed to work.8 Robinet in particular suggests that in cashing out the metaphor of God enlightening human minds, Malebranche moved from a static "ontologist" view of idea-objects in God to an active "illuminationist" view whereby divine ideas cause(intellectual [End Page 84] and sensory) perception by modifying the soul.9 Once one accepts this view of the place and function of efficacious ideas in Malebranche's metaphysics, it seems natural to accept Jolley's declaration that the only way for the mind to apprehend ideas in God is if those ideas "act directly on the mind; [if] they thereby cause cognitive states to arise in a substance which is devoid of all genuine cognitive capacities of its own."10 Indeed, Jolley suggests that Malebranche ultimately made the soul passive in all its states, including its volitional ones.11In this paper, I argue that a strong interpretation of efficacious ideas, whereby they appear to become true causal agents, must be rejected precisely because it pushes us into an incorrect reading of Malebranche's theory of the divine and human faculties. Making ideas true causal agents within God privileges divine reason at the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues for a version of sceptical invariantism about knowledge on which the acceptability of knowledge-attributing sentences varies with the context of assessment.

Pietroski successfully dismantles the idea of a formal semantic theory based on direct truth conditions and offers new and formally constrained alternatives. In this paper, I summarize the arguments but also provide a number of test cases to show that refusing to accept Pietroski's conclusions condemns the field to constantly restating and technically evading its own self‐created paradoxes. In the final section, I offer some positive proposals in the spirit of the Pietroskian enterprise with respect to thematic roles.

On the basis of psychological research, a group of philosophers known as 'situationists' argue that the evidence belies the existence of broad and stable (or 'global') character traits. They argue that this condemns as psychologically unrealistic those traditions in moral theory in which global virtues are upheld as ideals. After a survey of the debate to date, this article argues that the thesis of situationism is ill-supported by the available evidence. Situationists overlook the explanatory potential of a large class of (...) global character traits, namely, vices that do not involve other-directed malevolence, such as laziness, cowardice, and selfishness. A detailed discussion of the relevant empirical studies bearing on moral psychology shows that the behavioral patterns observed in these studies are consistent with the widespread possession of such non-malicious vices. This means, contrary to the situationist thesis, that the empirical record is fully compatible with the common existence of global character traits. (shrink)

This paper is about the putative theoretical virtue of strength, as it might be used in abductive arguments to the correct logic in the epistemology of logic. It argues for three theses. The first is that the well-defined property of logical strength is neither a virtue nor a vice, so that logically weaker theories are not—all other things being equal—worse or better theories than logically stronger ones. The second thesis is that logical strength does not entail the looser characteristic of (...) scientific strength, and the third is that many modern logics are on a par—or can be made to be on a par—with respect to scientific strength. (shrink)

This book asks whether evolution can help us to understand human behaviour and explores diverse evolutionary methods and arguments. It provides a short, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. It is widely used in undergraduate courses around the world.

This book fundamentally challenges the radical credentials of post-structuralism. Though Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze claim to have 'deconstructed' metaphysics, their work has much in common with previous attempts to 'end' the metaphysical tradition, from Kant to Nietzshe and Heidegger, and by sociology in general. Gillian Rose shows that this anti-metaphysical writing always appears in historically specific jurisprudential terms, which themselves found and recapitulate metaphysical categories. She reconsiders post-structuralism in this light and assesses the relationship between deconstruction and the earlier (...) structuralism of Saussure and Levi-Strauss. She argues in conclusion that the choice between post-structuralist nihilism and Hegelian and Marxist dialectic is spurious. (shrink)

A survey of contemporary work on logical pluralism.

Socioeconomic differences in behaviour are pervasive and well documented, but their causes are not yet well understood. Here, we make the case that a cluster of behaviours is associated with lower socioeconomic status, which we call “the behavioural constellation of deprivation.” We propose that the relatively limited control associated with lower SES curtails the extent to which people can expect to realise deferred rewards, leading to more present-oriented behaviour in a range of domains. We illustrate this idea using the specific (...) factor of extrinsic mortality risk, an important factor in evolutionary theoretical models. We emphasise the idea that the present-oriented behaviours of the constellation are a contextually appropriate response to structural and ecological factors rather than a pathology or a failure of willpower. We highlight some principles from evolutionary theoretical models that can deepen our understanding of how socioeconomic inequalities can become amplified and embedded. These principles are that small initial disparities can lead to larger eventual inequalities, feedback loops can embed early-life circumstances, constraints can breed further constraints, and feedback loops can operate over generations. We discuss some of the mechanisms by which SES may influence behaviour. We then review how the contextually appropriate response perspective that we have outlined fits with other findings about control and temporal discounting. Finally, we discuss the implications of this interpretation for research and policy. (shrink)

This article theorizes a research process in a highly politicized environment in which we, as feminist researchers, found ourselves standing outside the feminist standpoint which dominated Irish public discourse, viz advocacy of a Swedish-style, neo-abolitionist, prostitution policy. We suggest that our increasing personal and intellectual discomfort as that policy position gained support contained valuable epistemic insight. We theorize this principally by drawing on Pillow’s concept of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’. This article offers an account of the messy dynamics of a research (...) process in which we, in time, recognized our own psychosocial worlds as sites of social critique. We contribute to debates about reflexivity by exploring the insights which this approach brought when applied to the dynamics of power politics between us as researchers and the wider policy field within which we were immersed. (shrink)

In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose takes us beyond the impasse of post-modernism or 'despairing rationalism withour reason'. Arguing that the post-modern search for a 'new ethics' and ironic philosophy are incoherent, she breathes new life into the debates concerning power and domination, transcendence and eternity. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Gillian Rose's highly acclaimed memoir Love's Work. She extends similar clarity and insight to discussions of architecture, cinema, painting and poetry, through which (...) relations between the formation of the individual and the theory of justice are connected. At the heart of this reconnection lies a reflection on the significance of the Holocaust and Judaism. Mourning Becomes the Law reinvents the classical analogy of the soul, the city and the sacred. It returns philosophy, Nietzsche's 'bestowing virtue', to the pulse of our intellectual and political culture. (shrink)

The swamping problem is the problem of explaining why reliabilist knowledge (reliable true belief) has greater value than mere true belief. Swamping problem advocates see the lack of a solution to the swamping problem (i.e., the lack of a value-difference between reliabilist knowledge and mere true belief) as grounds for rejecting reliabilism. My aims here are (i) to specify clear requirements for a solution to the swamping problem that are as congenial to reliabilism's critics as possible, (ii) to clear away (...) various existing reliabilist solutions on the basis of these requirements, and (iii) to present a reliabilist solution that succeeds in meeting all of them. To meet all the requirements, my solution develops a more nuanced understanding of the epistemic end than is currently discussed, and with it a novel way of individuating beliefs. I close with a brief discussion of the question whether reliabilism's critics might impose further demands which reliabilism cannot possibly meet. (shrink)

In the present commentary, I argue that Foster has attacked an uncharitable reconstruction of Etchemendy's argument against Tarski's account of the logical properties. I provide an alternative, more charitable reconstruction of that argument that withstands Foster's objections.

I examine how reforming our international tax regime could be an important vehicle by which we can begin to realize global justice. For instance, eliminating tax havens, tax evasion, and transfer pricing schemes are all important to ensure accountability and to support democracies. I argue that the proposals concerning taxation reform are likely to be more effective in tackling global poverty than Thomas Pogge's global resources dividend because they target some of the central issues more effectively. I also discuss many (...) particular proposals for global taxes that have already been floated and implementation prospects and successes. (shrink)

Why would anyone purchase expensive, natural resource-intensive, and seemingly obsolete material carriers of music when streaming providers provide unlimited access to over 40 million songs for a small monthly fee? As I will show, we can no longer assume that contemporary interest is driven solely by a collector’s market or because of the audible qualities of the vinyl listening experience, and must attend to the many ways people engage with record objects today – and by extension, the vinyl record as (...) an ontological multiple. Through an analysis of Record Store Day 2015 and affiliated phenomena including YouTube unboxing videos, other social media activity and the Discogs resale market, I will demonstrate that the vinyl record gains value when the lived experience of materiality becomes an event and enables the performance of self in social contexts. As I will show, while certain types of actors have appreciably benefitted from the recent revival of interest in vinyl (e.g. brick and mortar stores, mastering engineers, manufacturing plants, and ancillary service industries), others have not to the same extent (e.g. musicians, independent record labels). (shrink)

Despite ideals of philosophical objectivity, who speaks is as important as what is said, and those who fall outside the Eurocentric male norm often are not heard or invited to participate in theorizing. New work chronicling and challenging the creation of white supremacist ideology in philosophy is needed greatly. In this important book, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, John Harfouch reveals the hermeneutical injustice that obscures how professional philosophers understand the mind-body problem today and how the terms (...) of that problem were created in the early modern period. Unlike the puzzle of causal relations between the mind and body canonized by white philosophers... (shrink)

Why is it important for people to agree on and articulate shared reasons for just laws, rather than whatever reasons they personally find compelling? What, if any, practical role does public reason play in liberal democratic politics? We argue that the practical role of public reason can be better appreciated by examining the confluence of normative and positive political theory; the former represented here by liberal social contract theory of John Rawls and others, and the latter by rational choice or (...) game theory. Citizens in a diverse society face a practical as well as a moral problem. How can they have confidence that others will reciprocate their commitment to supporting governing principles that depart from their own ideal conceptions of truth and value in order to be reasonable to all? Citizens face a practical problem of mutual assurance that public reason helps them solve, and solve as a matter of common knowledge. The solution, on both views, requires citizens’ reciprocal commitment to basing law on a system of shared reasons. Both views place public reason at the core of liberal democratic politics in conditions of diversity, and for quite similar reasons. Our argument illustrates the complementary roles of positive and values-based analysis in constitutional design. (shrink)