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.

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)

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.

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)

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?

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.

A radical new assessment of Hegel revealing the problems and limitations of sociological method.

Offering an engaging and accessible portrait of the current state of the field, Philosophy of Science: A New Introduction shows students how to think philosophically about science and why it is both essential and fascinating to do so. Gillian Barker and Philip Kitcher reconsider the core questions in philosophy of science in light of the multitude of changes that have taken place in the decades since the publication of C.G. Hempel's classic work, Philosophy of Natural Science —both in the (...) field and also in history and sociology of science and the sciences themselves. They explore how philosophical questions are connected to vigorous current debates—including climate change, science and religion, race, intellectual property rights, and medical research priorities—showing how these questions, and philosophers' attempts to answer them, matter in the real world. Featuring numerous illustrative examples and extensive further reading lists, Philosophy of Science: A New Introduction is ideal for courses in philosophy of science, history and philosophy of science, and epistemology/theory of knowledge. It is also compelling and illuminating reading for scientists, science students, and anyone interested in the natural sciences and in their place in global society today. (shrink)

Gillian Piggott's study of the resonances between the work of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin arrives in the wake of an increasing critical interest in Benjamin's life and thought, as an array of books from Graham Gilloch's Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (1996) to Esther Leslie's biographical Walter Benjamin (2007), and beyond, makes clear. While many critics have addressed Benjamin's importance to discussions of nineteenth-century modernity, Piggott's is the first booklength attempt to compare Benjamin and Dickens. (...) Fler goal is to produce a "creative comparison of the authors' responses to modernity" (4) rather than establish direct lines of influence, though she points out that Benjamin was aware of at least some of Dickens's work, particularly The Old Curiosity Shop and Great Expectations (11), and included fifteen entries about him in the Arcades Project (1927-40). (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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

Our brains are us. But we are neither happy, fulfilled, nor all that we 'should' (or maybe could) be. We have everything previous generations could have dreamed of, but it seems it's never quite enough. What's going on? Has it anything to do with the way those brains have developed, by any chance? Gillian Bridge takes us on a journey through time, history and the mysterious labyrinth that is the brain, investigating strange happenings and unlikely people on the way. (...) The Significance Delusion is a challenging explanation of our species' peculiar vulnerability to disorders of both thinking and social cohesion. It is a power pack of research, ideas, facts and fascinating real life stories which explores our species' obsession with meaning and significance. What does it all mean for me? What do I mean to you? The Significance Delusion is humorous as well as deeply serious, and it is the must read compilation of lifestyle advice for tomorrow's well-adjusted people. It is a book about what it takes to thrive and survive as an individual human and as a society. From it you will learn the meaning of life, and your place in the world. For parents, educators, thinkers, psychologists, psychotherapists and policy makers. (shrink)

Discusses the different ways in which the concept of imagination has been construed, and provides fascinating glimpses of the role of imagination in the creation and management of Modernity.

This article reviews three recent books that enhance our understanding of the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader, and Philosophy in the Feminine, a commentary on Irigaray's work by Margaret Whitford. The author emphasizes a dynamic reading of Irigaray's philosophy and integrates theoretical concepts with poetic/utopian passages from the works.

In the current academic climate, teaching is often seen as secondary to research. Teaching Philosophy seeks to bring teaching philosophy higher on the academic agenda.An international team of contributors, all of whom share the view that philosophy is a subject that can transform students, offers practical guidance and advice for teachers of philosophy. The book suggests ways in which the teaching of philosophy at undergraduate level might be facilitated. Some of the essays place the emphasis on individual self discovery, others (...) focus on the wider political context, many offer practical ideas for enhancing the teaching of philosophy through exercises that engage students in often unconventional ways. The integration of students' views on teaching provides a necessary reminder that teaching is not a one-way process, but a project that will ultimately succeed through cooperation and a shared sense of achievement amongst participants. (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...

In a period of rapid internationalization of trade and increased labor mobility, is it relevant for nations to think about their moral obligations to others? Do national boundaries have fundamental moral significance, or do we have moral obligations to foreigners that are equal to our obligations to our compatriots? The latter position is known as cosmopolitanism, and this volume brings together a number of distinguished political philosophers and theorists to explore cosmopolitanism: what it consists in, and the positive case which (...) can be made for it. Their essays provide a comprehensive overview of both the current state of the debate and the alternative visions of cosmopolitanism with which we can move forward, and they will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, political theory, and law. (shrink)

This state-of-the-art guide to some of the most exciting work in current linguistics explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. It examines how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal about the operations of language within the mind, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication. Leading international scholars present cutting-edge accounts of developments in the interfaces between phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. They bring to bear a rich (...) variety of methods and theoretical perspectives, focus on a broad array of issues and problems, and illustrate their arguments from a wide range of the world's languages. After the editors' introduction to its structure, scope, and content, the book is divided into four parts. The first, Sound, is concerned with the interfaces between phonetics and phonology, phonology and morphology, and phonology and syntax. Part II, Structure, considers the interactions of syntax with morphology, semantics, and the lexicon, and explores the status of the word and its representional status in the mind. Part III, Meaning, revisits the syntax-semantics interface from the perspective of compositionality, and looks at issues concerned with intonation, discourse, and context. The authors in the final part of the book, General Architectural Concerns, examine work on Universal Grammar, the overall model of language, and linguistic and associated theories of language and cognition. All scholars and advanced students of language will value this book, whether they are in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, computational science, or informatics. (shrink)

Melusine the Serpent Goddess in Myth and Literature examines how women were once worshipped as the life force, but later suppressed with the introduction of monotheism and a changing attitude regarding the sexes. It connects the literary conception of the Melusine story to myths and legends of the snake or dragon goddess, from ancient to contemporary times.

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)

Expressionism, Deleuze's philosophical commentary on Spinoza, is a critically important work because its conclusions provide the foundations for Deleuze's later metaphysical speculations on the nature of power, the body, difference and singularities. Deleuze and Spinoza is the first book to examine Deleuze's philosophical assessment of Spinoza and appraise his arguments concerning the Absolute, the philosophy of mind, epistemology and moral and political philosophy. The author respects and disagrees with Deleuze the philosopher and suggests that his arguments not only lead to (...) eliminativism and an Hobbesian politics but that they also cast a mystifying spell. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first multidisciplinary discussion of the topic of organism-environment (...) interaction. It brings together scholars from history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and biology to discuss the common focus of their work: entangled life, or the complex interaction of organisms and environments. (shrink)

The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects (...) the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror. (shrink)

The formulation and proof of Hume’s Law and several related inference barrier theses.

In recent years, housing costs have outpaced incomes in the United States, resulting in millions of eviction filings each year. Yet no study has examined the link between eviction and voting. Drawing on a novel data set that combines tens of millions of eviction and voting records, this article finds that residential eviction rates negatively impacted voter turnout during the 2016 presidential election. Results from a generalized additive model show eviction’s effect on voter turnout to be strongest in neighborhoods with (...) relatively low rates of displacement. To address endogeneity bias and estimate the causal effect of eviction on voting, the analysis treats commercial evictions as an instrument for residential evictions, finding that increases in neighborhood eviction rates led to substantial declines in voter turnout. This study demonstrates that the impact of eviction reverberates far beyond housing loss, affecting democratic participation. (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.

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)

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)

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.

Augustine, perhaps the most important and most widely read Father of the Church, first became preoccupied with the problem of evil in his boyhood, and this preoccupation continued throughout his life. Augustine's ideas about evil were to mark out the boundaries of the problem for those who came after him; his influence was greater and more widespread than any other early Christian thinker and is still of importance both with those who agree with him and with those who do not. (...) Augustine's personality, so loveably and intricately revealed in his Confessions, has always made him a figure of intense interest. (shrink)

Recent work on analyticity distinguishes two kinds, metaphysical and epistemic. This paper argues that the distinction allows for a new view in the philosophy of logic according to which the claims of logic are metaphysically analytic and have distinctive modal profiles, even though their epistemology is holist and in many ways rather Quinean. It is argued that such a view combines some of the more attractive aspects of the Carnapian and Quinean approaches to logic, whilst avoiding some famous problems.