The value problem -- Unpacking the value problem -- The swamping problem -- fundamental and non-fundamental epistemic goods -- The relevance of epistemic value monism -- Responding to the swamping problem I : the practical response -- Responding to the swamping problem II : the monistic response -- Responding to the swamping problem III : the pluralist response -- Robust virtue epistemology -- Knowledge and achievement -- Interlude : is robust virtue epistemology a reductive theory of knowledge? -- Achievement without (...) achievement -- Back to the value problem -- Contra virtue epistemology -- Two master intuitions about knowledge -- Anti-luck virtue epistemology -- Interlude : is anti-luck virtue epistemology a reductive theory of knowledge? -- Diagnosing the structure of knowledge -- Back to the value problem -- The final value of achievements -- Understanding -- Understanding and epistemic luck -- Understanding and cognitive achievement -- Back to the value problem -- Two potential implications of the distinctive value of understanding thesis -- The traditional analytical project and the central tension -- Knowledge, evidence, and reasons -- Concepts versus phenomena -- The way ahead -- Perceptual-recognitional abilities -- Broad and narrow competence -- Avoiding reduction -- Perpetual-recognitional abilities -- Broad and narrow competence -- Avoiding reduction -- Perceptual knowledge and justified belief -- Closure and doxastic responsibility -- Knowledge from indicators -- Recognitional abilities again -- Detached standing knowledge -- Back to knowledge from indicators -- Taking stock -- Why knowledge matters -- Approaching the epistemology of testimony -- Telling and informing -- Acquiring true beliefs and acquiring knowledge through being told -- Access to facts about knowledge -- The modest route -- Fool's knowledge -- The distinctive value of knowledge -- Fool's justification -- Arguing from illusion -- The regress of justifications -- Transparency and knowledge -- Transparency and entitlement -- On trying to do without transparency -- Transparency and luminosity -- Non-sensible knowledge -- Self-knowledge -- Non-sensible knowledge of action -- The two dimensions -- The distinctive value of knowledge of action -- Non-observational knowledge -- Practical knowledge and intention -- Practical knowledge and direction of fit. (shrink)

This article is about the special, subjective concepts we apply to experience, called “phenomenal concepts”. They are of special interest in a number of ways. First, they refer to phenomenal experiences, and the qualitative character of those experiences whose metaphysical status is hotly debated. Conscious experience strike many philosophers as philosophically problematic and difficult to accommodate within a physicalistic metaphysics. Second, PCs are widely thought to be special and unique among concepts. The sense that there is something special about PCs (...) is very closely tied up with features of the epistemic access they afford to qualia. When we deploy phenomenal concepts introspectively to some phenomenally conscious experience as it occurs, we are said to be acquainted with our own conscious experiences. Accounts of PCs either have to explain the acquaintance relation, or acquaintance with our phenomenal experiences has to be denied. PCs have received much attention in recent philosophy of mind mainly because they figure in arguments for dualism and in physicalist responses to these arguments. The main topic of this paper is to explore different accounts of phenomenal concepts and their role in recent debates over the metaphysical status of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to newinformation. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience.’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or (...) concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists Karni and Vierø (2013, 2015) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting. (shrink)

This paper surveys attempts in the recent literature to offer a modal condition on knowledge as a way of resolving the problem of scepticism. In particular, safety-based and sensitivity-based theories of knowledge are considered in detail, along with the anti-sceptical prospects of an explicitly anti-luck epistemology.

I argue that different approaches to environmental ethics can be traced to different ways of thinking about value. In particular, it can be traced to different understandings of what kinds of things are the primary bearers of value and different views about how we should respond to that value. These different ways of thinking about value are thought to have their origins in consequentialism and Kantianism, respectively. I briefly describe these theoretical differences and consider how they lead to different approaches (...) in environmental ethics, with particular attention to the issue of climate change. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has reflected a growing interest in the social dimension of the subject. This volume presents new work by leading philosophers on a wide range of topics in social epistemology, such as the nature of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the social genealogy of the concept of knowledge.

Background: Clinical and experimental findings have suggested that insomnia is associated with altered emotion processing, such as facial emotion recognition and impairments in executive functions. However, the results still appear non-consensual and have recently been presented by a few number of studies. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether patients with Insomnia disorder will present alterations in recognition of facial emotions and that such alterations will be related to Executive Functions and that Insomnia Disorder patients will (...) exhibit a lower Executive Functions performance when compared to normal controls individuals. Method: A total of 11 individuals diagnosed with insomnia disorder and 15 control participants took part in the present cross-sectional study. They completed questionnaires covering socio-demographic data, a sleep and mood evaluation, and a cognitive assessment. Moreover, they underwent a computerized Facial Emotional Recognition test, consisting of facial emotion labeling and facial emotion matching. Results: Individuals with insomnia presented a lower recognition of facial expressions of fear and sadness in comparison to control volunteers. Perceptual Organization Index was found to be statistically significant lower in the insomnia group compared to the control group. There was a statistically significant association between facial recognition emotional and cognitive processes of in executive functions performance, especially in processes related to the inhibitory control, planning capacity, problem solving and cognitive flexibility in insomnia group. Conclusions: Insomnia disorder impairs the facial emotion recognition of the fear and sadness. Insomniacs with impairment in the facial emotion recognition had impaired performance of executive functions. There is a negative impact on processes related to cognitive-emotional capacity than on processes related to social-emotional recognition. Keywords: insomnia, facial emotional recognition, sleep deprivation, cognition, executive functions. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for safety-based theories of knowledge in the light of some recent objections.

Grey zone attacks tend to paralyze response for two reasons. First, they present us with choice scenarios of inherently dilemmatic structure, e.g., Prisoners’ Dilemmas and games of chicken, complicated by difficult conditions of choice, such as choice under risk or amid vagueness. Second, they exploit our uncertainty about how much we do or should care about the things under attack¬—each attack is small in effect, but their effects accumulate: how should we decide whether to treat a given attack as something (...) meriting a serious response rather than a mere irritation to be ignored? This chapter brings standard decision theoretic tools to bear on the issues, tools such as the maximization of expected utility principle, and the precautionary principle. But it also develops three innovations. It shows that seeing it as possible to make choices not just of actions given our values, but also choices of values themselves, can extricate us from certain kinds of decision paralysis. It shows how we can rationally regard ourselves as having bright decision lines even when nothing in the circumstance of choice has these lines in its structure. And it shows how certain conflict escalation risks from the former two strategies can be managed by both parties seeing that cooperation can yield a sharable surplus of goods, and that cooperation can be rational upon a rationally defensible change in their values so that each comes to derive utility from the success of both parties. This yields cooperative solutions to what amount to Prisoners’ Dilemmas. The Cold War was prosecuted on the logic of strategic rationality and that part of game theory that is deterrence theory. We need a new logic from decision theorists for the games that constitute grey zone conflict. (shrink)

Much of the recent debate regarding scepticism has focussed on a certain template sceptical argument and a rather restricted set of proposals concerning how one might deal with that argument. Throughout this debate the ‘Moorean’ response to scepticism is often cited as a paradigm example of how one should not respond to the sceptical argument, so conceived. As I argue in this paper, however, there are ways of resurrecting the Moorean response to the sceptic. In particular, I consider the prospects (...) for three such proposals in this regard: a classical epistemic internalist neo-Mooreanism, a classical epistemic externalist neo-Mooreanism, and a non-classical McDowellian epistemic internalist neo-Mooreanism, and maintain that the last two of these proposals (both of which make appeal to a disjunctivist account of perception, broadly conceived) merit further exploration. Indeed, I claim that a suitably qualified version of neo-Mooreanism would actually sit quite well with the general philosophical motivations behind other key anti-sceptical views and I argue that given this fact neo-Mooreanism is actually at a dialectical advantage relative to other views when it comes to dealing with the sceptical problem as it is typically conceived. (shrink)

This article defends an account of collective hope that arises through solidarity in the pursuit of justice. I begin by reviewing recent literature on the nature of hope. I then explore the relationship between hope and solidarity to demonstrate the ways in which solidarity can give rise to hope. I suggest that the hope born of solidarity is collective when it is shared by at least some others, when it is caused or strengthened by activity in a collective action setting, (...) and when the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the group. In the context of social movements, collective hope emerges alongside the collective intentions and actions of the solidarity group; namely, in the pursuit of a form of social justice that inspires the movement. I then suggest that the object of collective hope born of solidarity is the guiding ideal of justice and reflect on what it might mean to hope well for justice. (shrink)

Over the years, Katie Cannon's students referred to her work in progress as "Katie's canon." Not only does this book represent the canon of Cannon's best work; the book itself directly addresses the issues of canon formation and canon reformation. Cannon canonizes a literary tradition and directly addresses both oppression and liberation of African American women. Now in an expanded 25th-anniversary edition, Katie's Canon still packs firepower.

This paper traces the history of remoteness in contract law, namely the legal formants (in Rodolfo Sacco’s terms) constraining the availability of contract damages in various legal systems. Our journey takes us through different times, continents and cultures, from the eighteenth century to the twenty–first century, across the law of France, United States, England and Wales, India and Australia, among other jurisdictions. While it might seem that civilian and common law traditions have very different morphological legal forms, once a closer (...) historical, cultural, and anthropological gaze is turned upon the legal formants involved, it can be seen that remoteness discloses a shared concern which may be common to many human societies and cultures. In other words, as a matter of social experience, humans who enter into transactions generally realise that it is impossible to know the future, or to know what all outcomes of the transaction will be. Consequently, it is recognised that it would be unfair and unjust to hold a defendant liable for all outcomes, and as our journey will show, legal systems seek guidance from other legal systems in their efforts to deal with this problem. (shrink)

The recent popularity of contextualist treatments of the key epistemic concepts has tended to obscure the differences that exist between the various kinds of contextualist theses on offer. The aim of this paper is to contribute towards rectifying this problem by exploring two of the main formulations of the contextualist position currently on offer in the literature—the 'semantic' contextualist thesis put forward by Keith DeRose and David Lewis, and the 'inferential' contextualist thesis advanced by Michael Williams. It is argued that (...) by evaluating these theses in the light of each other one can gain a deeper understanding of the contextualist position. In particular, it is argued that this relative evaluation highlights one interesting way in which contextualism might be developed. (shrink)

The majority of U.S. abortion patients are poor women, and Black and Hispanic women. Therefore, this article encourages bioethicists and equity advocates to consider whether the need for abortion c...

While the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversal invariant, most macroscopic processes are irreversible. Given that the fundamental laws are taken to underpin all other processes, how can the fundamental time-symmetry be reconciled with the asymmetry manifest elsewhere? In statistical mechanics, progress can be made with this question. What I dub the ‘Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace framework’ can be used to construct the irreversible equations of SM from the underlying microdynamics. Yet this framework uses coarse-graining, a procedure that has faced much criticism. I (...) focus on two objections in the literature: claims that coarse-graining makes time-asymmetry ‘illusory’ and ‘anthropocentric’. I argue that these objections arise from an unsatisfactory justification of coarse-graining prevalent in the literature, rather than from coarse-graining itself. This justification relies on the idea of measurement imprecision. By considering the role that abstraction and autonomy play, I provide an alternative justification and offer replies to the illusory and anthropocentric objections. Finally, I consider the broader consequences of this alternative justification: the connection to debates about inter-theoretic reduction and the implication that the time-asymmetry in SM is weakly emergent. 1Introduction 1.1Prospectus2The Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace Framework3Why Does This Method Work? 3.1The special conditions account3.2When is a density forwards-compatible?4Anthropocentrism and Illusion: Two Objections 4.1The two objections in more detail4.2Against the justification by measurement imprecision5An Alternative Justification 5.1Abstraction and autonomy5.2An illustration: the Game of Life6Reply to Illusory7Reply to Anthropocentric8The Wider Landscape: Concluding Remarks 8.1Inter-theoretic relations8.2The nature of irreversibility. (shrink)

In the early years of the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included, from 1702 to 1704, discussions of materialism. Those discussions culminated with the consideration of Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena, where Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. In this paper I argue for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. The first is that, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Serena a (...) Spinozist, we can make better sense of him as a sort of Hobbesian materialist. The second main point concerns reasons for materialism, and in particular a story Locke tells in the Essay about materialists' motives. Toland defends his materialism by arguing that matter is active, and argues that matter is active by using a conceivability argument. But this is not the crude conceivability argument that Locke suggests motivates materialists. This (together with reflecting on some of Hobbes's arguments) suggests that we might well tell a Lockean story about reasons for early modern materialism, but not Locke's story. (shrink)

The ecosystem services argument is a highly publicised instrumental argument for protecting biodiversity. I develop a new objection to this argument based on the lack of a causal connection from global species losses to local ecosystem changes. I survey some alternative formulations of services arguments, including ones incorporating option value or a precautionary principle, and show that they do not fare much better than the standard version. I conclude that environmental thinkers should rely less on ecosystem services as a means (...) to defend biodiversity, and that attention should be focused on additional types of value which might be attributed to global biodiversity. (shrink)

It is claimed that McDowell’s treatment of scepticism offers a potential way of resurrecting the much derided ‘Moorean’ response to scepticism in a fashion that avoids the problems facing classical internalist and externalist construals of neo-Mooreanism. I here evaluate the prospects for a McDowellian neo-Mooreanism and, in doing so, offer further support for the view.

The status of boundaries and borders, questions of global poverty and inequality, criteria for the legitimate uses of force, the value of international law, human rights, nationality, sovereignty, migration, territory, and citizenship: debates over these critical issues are central to contemporary understandings of world politics. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of contributors, including historians, political theorists, lawyers, and international relations scholars, this is the first volume of its kind to explore the racial and imperial dimensions of normative debates over global (...) justice. (shrink)

A common criticism of the use of algorithms in criminal justice is that algorithms and their determinations are in some sense ‘opaque’—that is, difficult or impossible to understand, whether because of their complexity or because of intellectual property protections. Scholars have noted some key problems with opacity, including that opacity can mask unfair treatment and threaten public accountability. In this paper, we explore a different but related concern with algorithmic opacity, which centers on the role of public trust in grounding (...) the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions. We argue that algorithmic opacity threatens the trustworthiness of criminal justice institutions, which in turn threatens their legitimacy. We first offer an account of institutional trustworthiness before showing how opacity threatens to undermine an institution’s trustworthiness. We then explore how threats to trustworthiness affect institutional legitimacy. Finally, we offer some policy recommendations to mitigate the threat to trustworthiness posed by the opacity problem. (shrink)

When we experience the world – see, hear, feel, taste, or smell things – we gain all sorts of knowledge about the things around us. And this knowledge figures heavily in our reasoning about the world – about what to think and do in response to it. But what is the nature of this knowledge? On one commonly held view, all knowledge is constituted by beliefs in propositions. But in this paper I argue against this view. I argue that some (...) knowledge is constituted, not by beliefs in propositions, but by awareness of properties and objects. To make my case, I focus on the role of visual perception in reasoning. I start by introducing a principle about the relationship between knowledge and reasoning, which says that to learn something new by reasoning, one must know the bases of one’s reasoning. Then I argue that in some cases of genuine, knowledge-conferring reasoning, the bases of our reasoning are not propositions that we believe; rather, they’re properties or objects that we see. Thus, I conclude that some such knowledge is non-propositional and is rather what some call “knowledge of things”. (shrink)

In this paper we describe an approach to practical reasoning, reasoning about what it is best for a particular agent to do in a given situation, based on presumptive justifications of action through the instantiation of an argument scheme, which is then subject to examination through a series of critical questions. We identify three particular aspects of practical reasoning which distinguish it from theoretical reasoning. We next provide an argument scheme and an associated set of critical questions which is able (...) to capture these features. In order that both the argument scheme and the critical questions can be given precise interpretations we use the semantic structure of an Action-Based Alternating Transition System as the basis for their definition. We then work through a detailed example to show how this approach to practical reasoning can be applied to a problem solving situation, and briefly describe some other previous applications of the general approach. In a second example we relate our account to the social laws paradigm for co-ordinating multi-agent systems. The contribution of the paper is to provide firm foundations for an approach to practical reasoning based on presumptive argument in terms of a well-known model for representing the effects of actions of a group of agents. (shrink)

The search for the statistical mechanical underpinning of thermodynamic irreversibility has so far focussed on the spontaneous approach to equilibrium. But this is the search for the underpinning of what Brown and Uffink have dubbed the ‘minus first law’ of thermodynamics. In contrast, the second law tells us that certain interventions on equilibrium states render the initial state ‘irrecoverable’. In this article, I discuss the unusual nature of processes in thermodynamics, and the type of irreversibility that the second law embodies. (...) I then search for the microscopic underpinning or statistical mechanical ‘reductive basis’ of the second law of thermodynamics by taking a functionalist strategy. First, I outline the functional role of the thermodynamic entropy: for a thermally isolated system, the thermodynamic entropy is constant in quasi-static processes, but increasing in non-quasi-static processes. I then search for the statistical mechanical quantity that plays this role—rather than the role of the traditional ‘holy grail’ as described by Callender. I argue that in statistical mechanics, the Gibbs entropy plays this role. (shrink)

The Making of British Bioethics provides the first in-depth study of how philosophers, lawyers and other 'outsiders' came to play a major role in discussing and helping to regulate issues that used to be left to doctors and scientists. It details how British bioethics emerged thanks to a dynamic interplay between sociopolitical concerns and the aims of specific professional groups and individuals who helped create the demand for outside involvement and transformed themselves into influential 'ethics experts'. Highlighting this interplay helps (...) us appreciate how issues such as embryo research and assisted dying became high-profile 'bioethical' concerns in the late twentieth century, and why different groups now play a critical role in developing regulatory standards and leading public debates. The book draws on a wide range of original sources and will be of interest to historians of medicine and science, general historians and bioethicists. (shrink)

This advanced textbook, now in its second edition, provides an accessible overview of some of the main issues in contemporary epistemology. Written by an expert in the field, it covers such key topics as virtue epistemology, anti-luck epistemology, epistemological disjunctivism, epistemic value, understanding, radical scepticism, and contextualism. This book is ideal as a set text for an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate course in epistemology, and will also be of general interest to researchers in philosophy.

The chapter begins by exploring a philosophical case study of the use of intuitions — viz., the debate regarding the problem of radical scepticism, paying particular attention to key figures within this debate such as Barry Stroud, John Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It contends that this debate demonstrates something interesting about the nature of intuitions and the role that they can play in philosophical inquiry. In particular, the chapter argues that we need to think of the philosophical use of intuitions (...) as at least sometimes involving a significant level of expertise. The chapter closes by considering the relevance of this point about philosophical intuitions to the negative programme in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper we describe the impact that Walton’s conception of argumentation schemes had on AI and Law research. We will discuss developments in argumentation in AI and Law before Walton’s schemes became known in that community, and the issues that were current in that work. We will then show how Walton’s schemes provided a means of addressing all of those issues, and so supplied a unifying perspective from which to view argumentation in AI and Law.

Internet protocol development is a social process, and resulting protocols are shaped by their developers’ politics and values. This article argues that the work of protocol development poses barriers to developers’ reflection upon values and politics in protocol design. A participant observation of a team developing internet protocols revealed that difficulties defining the stakeholders in an infrastructure and tensions between local and global viewpoints both complicated values reflection. Further, Internet architects tended to equate a core value of interoperability with values (...) neutrality. The article describes how particular work practices within infrastructure development overcame these challenges by engaging developers in praxis: situated, lived experience of the social nature of technology. (shrink)

In this paper, I do three things. First, I offer an overview of an anti- luck epistemology, as set out in my book, Epistemic Luck. Second, I attempt to meet some of the main criticisms that one might level against the key theses that I propose in this work. And finally, third, I sketch some of the ways in which the strategy of anti- luck epistemology can be developed in new directions.

I develop an account of ecological role functions—the functions of species within ecosystems—which is informed by alternative regime phenomena in ecology. My account is a causal-role theory which includes a counterfactual sensitivity condition. The account tracks and explains a distinction ecologists make between functions and various activities which are not functions. My counterfactual sensitivity condition resolves the liberality problem often attributed to causal-role theories of function, while also illuminating the explanatory centrality of role functions within ecology.

This paper addresses the stalemate on the question whether biodiversity has intrinsic value. I distinguish between a “weak” conception and two “strong” conceptions of intrinsic value in the environmental ethics literature. The strong conceptions of intrinsic value are connected, respectively, to moral standing and to a strongly objectivist account of value. Neither of these forms of value likely applies to biodiversity. However, the weak conception of intrinsic value is neutral about both moral standing and the nature of value and plausibly (...) applies to biodiversity. In addition, weak intrinsic value avoids common objections to the claim that biodiversity is intrinsically valuable. I develop a cumulative argument showing that environmentalists should presume that biodiversity has intrinsic value in the weak sense. (shrink)

In what sense are the special sciences autonomous of fundamental physics? Autonomy is an enduring theme in discussions of the relationship between the special sciences and fundamental physics or, more generally, between higher and lower-level facts. Discussion of ‘autonomy’ often fails to recognise that autonomy admits of degrees; consequently, autonomy is either taken to require full independence, or risk relegation to mere apparent autonomy. In addition, the definition of autonomy used by Fodor, the most famous proponent of the autonomy of (...) the special sciences, has been robustly criticised by Loewer. In this paper I develop a new account of autonomy following Woodward which I dub ‘generalised autonomy’ since it unifies dynamical, causal and nomic autonomy. Autonomy, on this account, can be partial: some lower-level details matter while others do not. To summarise: whilst the detailed lower level is unconditionally relevant, conditionalising on the higher-level facts renders some lower-level details irrelevant. The macrodependencies that the higher-level facts enter into — be they dynamical, causal or nomic — screen off the underlying microdetails. This account helps resolve an explanatory puzzle: if the lower-level facts in some way underpin the higher-level facts, why don’t the lower-level details matter more for the day-to-day practice of the special sciences? The answer will be: the facts uncovered by the special sciences are autonomous in my sense, and so practitioners of these special sciences need not study more fundamental sciences, since these underlying facts are genuinely irrelevant. (shrink)

In this paper we consider persuasion in the context of practical reasoning, and discuss the problems associated with construing reasoning about actions in a manner similar to reasoning about beliefs. We propose a perspective on practical reasoning as presumptive justification of a course of action, along with critical questions of this justification, building on the account of Walton. From this perspective, we articulate an interaction protocol, which we call PARMA, for dialogues over proposed actions based on this theory. We outline (...) an axiomatic semantics for the PARMA Protocol, and discuss two implementations which use this protocol to mediate a discussion between humans. We then show how our proposal can be made computational within the framework of agents based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model, and illustrate this proposal with an example debate within a multi agent system. (shrink)

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways in political thought and social science. This essay challenges how the liberal tradition is typically understood. I start by delineating different types of response—prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory—that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. Liberalism, on this account, is best characterised as the sum of the (...) arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time and space. In the remainder of the article, I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how Locke came to be characterised as a liberal. I argue that the scope of the liberal traditionexpanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious understanding of liberalism was a product of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it. (shrink)

In this article, I explore recent work on realist political theory and international politics. I discuss how scholarship on the topic emanates from two different fields—International Relations and political philosophy—and argue that there is a good case for greater engagement between them. I open by delineating various kinds of realism, showing that the term covers a wide variety of methodological and political approaches. In particular, I suggest, it is important to recognize the difference between liberal and radical approaches. The remainder (...) of the essay examines assorted examples of realist international political theorizing, work that ranges from attempts to rewrite the canon of 20th century political thought to contributions to the vibrant global justice debates. (shrink)

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. “fear” is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process—a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in (...) the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development. (shrink)

In their review, Ruba and Repacholi summarize the methods used to assess preverbal infants’ understanding of emotions, and analyze the existing evidence in light of classical and constructionist ac...