In the physical sciences a realist ontology rests on our ability to demonstrate the actual and real nature of material entities. Realist metaphysics of social entities, most influentially Bhaskar's critical realism, attempt to provide a related philosophical foundation for the social sciences. This paper examines the central issue of what is real about society it concludes that social relations and the organisations they constitute do exist and discusses the conditions of their demonstration. Realist interpretations of Bourdieu's theories are given particular (...) attention in an argument that accepts the necessity of social realism but remains cautious about the development of methodologies able to provide effective demonstration. (shrink)

William Keith Brooks was an American zoologist at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 until his death in 1908. Over the course of his career, Brooks staunchly defended Darwinism, arguing for the centrality of natural selection in evolutionary theory at a time when alternative theories, such as neo-Lamarckism, grew prominent in American biology. In his book The Law of Heredity, Brooks addressed problems raised by Darwin’s theory of pangenesis. In modifying and developing Darwin’s pangenesis, Brooks proposed a new theory of heredity (...) that sought to avoid the pitfalls of Darwin’s hypothesis. In so doing he strengthened Darwin’s theory of natural selection by undermining arguments for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In later attacks on neo-Lamarckism, Brooks consistently defended Darwin’s theory of natural selection on logical grounds, continued to challenge the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and argued that natural selection best explained a wide range of adaptations. Finally, he critiqued Galton’s statistical view of heredity and argued that Galton had resurrected an outmoded typological concept of species, one which Darwin and other naturalists had shown to be incorrect. Brooks’s ideas resemble the “biological species concept” of the twentieth century, as developed by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and others. The late-nineteenth century was not a period of total “eclipse” of Darwinism, as biologists and historians have hitherto seen it. Although the “Modern Synthesis” refers to the reconciliation of post-Mendelian genetics with evolution by natural selection, we might adjust our understanding of how the synthesis developed by seeing it as the culmination of a longer discussion that extends back to the late-nineteenth century. (shrink)

The title of this book can be understood in at least two ways. First of all, The Word of God and the Mind of Man is an exploration of the extent to which the human mind can receive and understand divine revelation, insofar as this revelation is understood to include the communication of truth. On a second and more fundamental level, the phrase the word of God recalls its classical context -- the prologue to John's Gospel and the classical Logos (...) doctrine of the early church fathers: all human knowledge is possible because of the unique human participation in the eternal Logos of God, Jesus Christ. - Preface. (shrink)

This book deals with the relationship between feminism and liberalism in theory and practice. The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratization in the nineteenth century and how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analyzed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term "women" is (...) used as an "undecidable" in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are then linked to liberal-democratic social and political practices, including feminism as a social movement. (shrink)

This paper regards the plausibility of rejecting the scholastic claim that the “good” is a transcendental property of being—that ens et bonum convertuntur—onthe basis of two claims: (1) Stephen Cahn’s claim that evil worlds created by an evil God are intrinsically plausible—i.e., that it is plausible to think of evil as a positive and instantiable property; and (2) the claim that “evil is a primitive”—that is, that evil is a primary or basic ontological property. It argues that if an “ontological (...) primitive” must be a property which has no basic constituents other than itself—or whose definition cannot invoke concepts or constituents other than the primitive itself—evil itself cannot be considered a primitive. Nor can it be considered a positive property. (shrink)

Speculative approaches to history.--v. 2. The critical philosophy of history.

This article is concerned with post-Marxism and materialism in the work of Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As `post-Marxists' these writers use `material' in a variety of ways, all of which indicate limits and constraints. The article focuses on one version of `materialism' in this work, a version that is more implied than elaborated, in which `material' is equivalent to institutionalized performativity or sedimented discourse: to `objective' social structures and institutions. Post-Marxists often use `the social' as equivalent to (...) `material' in this sense, to gesture towards the context in which politics succeeds or fails. I argue that the specificities of `the social' cannot be theorized from within the terms of post-Marxism itself and that Butler and Laclau acknowledge this limitation in their most recent work. I therefore conclude that post-Marxism needs a supplement that I call political sociology. This is a dangerous supplement in the Derridean sense: a necessary addition that destabilizes the value post-Marxism gives to the distinction between `social' and `political' in which the latter is the privileged term. (shrink)

Christian theology and ethics are largely inadequate to confront the ecological crisis of today. They are in need of reformation. At the center of Christian faith, we shall not find a mandate to pollute, plunder, and prey on the rest of nature. Instead, we shall discover that the core affirmations endow all life with a moral significance that entails human responsibility toward the whole of nature.

This article rewrites the history of the tomb of Philip the Bold made for the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon, through a close reading and re-transcription of the entire archival record, including some previously unknown documents, paying careful attention to what their terminology and chronology reveal about time, cost, materials and process; it analyses the scale of the project, and in particular the acquisition and working of materials: limestone from Tonnerre, ‘alabaster’ as spolia from Autun, black marble from Dinant, white (...) marble, presumably from Italy, via Paris, alabaster from Grenoble and a pinkish limestone from Resne, near Dijon. By reconsidering this record, along with the physical and visual evidence of the existing monument, it argues that there was not one but two tombs made for Philip the Bold: the first was completed by Jean de Marville and then rejected by Philip, and perhaps also by the Carthusians; the second, that we have today, was started again from scratch in the early 1390s by Claus Sluter, in collaboration, possibly, with Jacques de Baerze. The story of how these two tombs were planned, worked on, adapted or restarted, along with what Marville’s abandoned project may have looked like, and what may have become of its constituent parts, is woven into the narrative of Philip’s political and religious ambitions, the role of his wife Margaret of Flanders, and of the construction and decoration of the Chartreuse de Champmol itself. (shrink)

Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness of his fiction, with its Gaelic humor and extraordinary linguistic virtuosity, has made a small stir in France, but is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Gapos: vies chimériques, published by LePassage in 2011, described in Le Monde as "une des excellentes surprises de ce début de (...) l'année", placed him squarely in the lineage of Rabelais to Joyce. In 2015, Tilliette's second Bildungsroman-gone-awry, Un sentiment humain... (shrink)

Over the years, companies have adopted hiring algorithms because they promise wider job candidate pools, lower recruitment costs and less human bias. Despite these promises, they also bring perils. Using them can inflict unintentional harms on individual human rights. These include the five human rights to work, equality and nondiscrimination, privacy, free expression and free association. Despite the human rights harms of hiring algorithms, the AI ethics literature has predominantly focused on abstract ethical principles. This is problematic for two reasons. (...) First, AI principles have been criticized for being vague and not actionable. Second, the use of vague ethical principles to discuss algorithmic risks does not provide any accountability. This lack of accountability creates an algorithmic accountability gap. Closing this gap is crucial because, without accountability, the use of hiring algorithms can lead to discrimination and unequal access to employment opportunities. This paper makes two contributions to the AI ethics literature. First, it frames the ethical risks of hiring algorithms using international human rights law as a universal standard for determining algorithmic accountability. Second, it evaluates four types of algorithmic impact assessments in terms of how effectively they address the five human rights of job applicants implicated in hiring algorithms. It determines which of the assessments can help companies audit their hiring algorithms and close the algorithmic accountability gap. (shrink)

In _Beyond Animal Rights_, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams introduced feminist "ethic of care" theory into philosophical discussions of the treatment of animals. In this new volume, seven essays from _Beyond Animal Rights_ are joined by nine new articles-most of which were written in response to that book-and a new introduction that situates feminist animal care theory within feminist theory and the larger debate over animal rights. Contributors critique theorists' reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they (...) suggest, have a masculine bias. They argue for ethical attentiveness and sympathy in our relationships with animals and propose a link between the continuing subjugation of women and the human domination of nature. Beginning with the earliest articulation of the idea in the mid-1980s and continuing to the theory's most recent revisions, this volume presents the most complete portrait of the evolution of the feminist-care tradition. (shrink)

In this paper, I shed light on Kant’s notion of Erkenntnis or cognition by focusing on texts pertaining to Kant’s thoughts on logic. Although a passage from Kant’s Logik is widely referred to for understanding Kant’s conception of Erkenntnis, this work was not penned by Kant himself but rather compiled by Benjamin Jäsche. So, it is imperative to determine its fidelity to Kant’s thought. I compare the passage with other sources, including Reflexionen and students’ lecture notes. I argue that several (...) of the text’s peculiarities stem from Jäsche rather than Kant, but that nevertheless Jäsche largely got Kant's view right, with two major exceptions. First, Jäsche’s text fails to reproduce Kant’s key thesis that kennen and verstehen are jointly sufficient for Erkenntnis. Second, Jäsche’s text gives the false impression that Kant holds that animals have consciousness. (shrink)