This volume provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the emerging concept of the evolution of consciousness. It presents an overarching model that moves us to a new level of meaning and understanding of our place in the world.

The nature of quantum mechanical probability has often seemed mysterious. To shed some light on this topic, the present paper analyzes the logical form of probability assignment in quantum mechanics. To begin the paper, I set out and criticize several attempts to analyze the form. I go on to propose a new form which utilizes a novel, probabilistic conditional and argue that this proposal is, overall, the best rendering of the quantum mechanical probability assignments. Finally, quantum mechanics aside, the discussion (...) here has consequences for counterfactual logic, conditional probability, and epistemic probability. (shrink)

After the Second World War, Adorno was politically engaged as a critical public intellectual in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Nonetheless, in the 1960s, a time of active protest against established norms and the underlying socio‐economic and political conditions, he was widely perceived by the protesting activists as adopting an attitude of resignation in blatant contradiction to the aims of his critical social theory. The chapter considers the validity of this accusation. Section 37.1 sets out Adorno's position with regard (...) to the relationship between theory and praxis from the 1950s onwards. Section 37.2 considers the adequacy of his position from the point of view of Critical Social Theory's fundamental concern with radical societal transformation. Contending that Adorno does in effect adopt a stance of resignation vis‐à‐vis radical societal transformation, it draws attention to some questionable elements in his theory that push him toward adopting this stance. It concludes that his theory would benefit from dispensing with them. (shrink)

This article examines the anxiety expressed by von Wright over the status of the deontic permission, P, as an independent normative category, given the interdefinability between P and O at the foundation of deontic logic. Two concerns are noted: the reducibility of P to O, and the inadequacy of P to convey a full permission in a social setting. Drawing on resources from the Hohfeldian analytical framework, the relational and aggregate features of permission are explored, and an aggregate conception of (...) permission, P, is recognized. With the assistance of insights from Demey and Smessaert on duals, Hansson on formalization, and Soames on interdefinability, it is concluded that the interdefinability thesis can be defended without threatening the independent status of P. Additional grounds for reaching this conclusion are provided from a detailed analysis of the relationship between P and P. Some implications of the more expansive notion of permission, P, are considered with regard to the resources of deontic logic and their application. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative study of the approaches of Dworkin and Aristotle to money and the market. For Dworkin the importance of this subject lies in the use he makes of the device of a hypothetical auction to provide the basis of a conception of equality of resources, compatible with liberty, and sustained by his view of ethical individualism. The technical adequacy of Dworkin's auction is considered with the assistance of an insight taken from Aristotle's comments on money, which (...) brings to light the secondary conceptual status of money. Dworkin's attempts to produce a metric of equality of resources are found wanting. It is suggested that Aristotle's insight has repercussions for Dworkin's broader project, as well as implication for any attempt to use the market to provide a sense of value in human affairs. (shrink)

Philosophy for International Lawyers: A review of Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas, The Philosophy of International Law by Patrick Capps.

This chapter contains sections titled: Is Philosophy Part of Web Science?; Representations and the Web; Enactive Search; Cognitive Extension and Cognitive Intelligence; From the Extended Mind to the Web; and the Web as Collective Intelligence.

The ‘structural injustice’ framework is an increasingly influential way of thinking about historical injustice. Structural injustice theorists argue against reparations for historical injustice on the grounds that our focus should be on forward-looking responsibility for contemporary structural injustice. Through the use of a case study – the Caribbean Community 10-Point Plan for reparations from 2014 – I argue that this reasoning is flawed. Backward-looking reparations can be justified on the basis of state liability over time. The value of backward-looking reparations (...) is that they ensure that historical perpetrators do not evade their reparative obligations and that affected communities are taken seriously. However, I argue that this backward-looking approach should be supplemented by a forward-looking structural injustice approach and the ‘social connection model’ of responsibility, which can expand the scope of responsible agents and forms of injustice that warrant repair and explain how citizens living now can be expected to pay for crimes of the past. (shrink)

The undraped human form is ubiquitous in Western art and even appears in the art of India and Japan. Only in China, François Jullien argues, is the nude completely absent. In this enthralling extended essay, he explores the different conceptions of the human body that underlie this provocative disparity. Contrasting nakedness with nudity, Jullien explores the traditional European vision of the nude as a fixed point of fusion where form joins truth. He then shows that the absence of the nude (...) in Chinese art evinces an understanding of the human body as changeable and transitory. Viewed in light of each other, these differing concepts allow for a new way of thinking about form, the ideal, and beauty, enabling us to delve deeper into the relationship between art and the ideas that lie at its roots. Beautifully illustrated and gracefully translated into English for the first time, _The Impossible Nude_ will fascinate anyone interested in art history, Chinese art, or aesthetics. (shrink)

The concept of “structural injustice” has a long intellectual lineage, but Iris Marion Young popularised the term in her late work in the 2000s. Young’s theory tapped into the zeitgeist of the time, providing a credible way of thinking about transnational and domestic injustices, illuminating the importance of political, economic and social structures in generating injustice, theorising the role of individuals in perpetuating structural injustice, and the responsibility of everyone to try to correct it. Young’s theory has inspired secondary and (...) novel research. In this paper, I outline the main topics in this recent literature: what structural injustice is, responsibility for structural injustice, acting on responsibility, avoiding responsibility, and historical injustice. I conclude by noting how the influence of structural injustice theory is spreading beyond the confines of political theory. Any field that is concerned with structural inequalities, disadvantage, or oppression, can utilize structural injustice theory. (shrink)

If Third World women form ‘the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,’ as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist (...) definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression. (shrink)

In Epicurean cosmology, material reconstitution, or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία) is the necessary consequence of the infinity of time and the eternity of atoms. I examine Lucretius’ treatment of this phenomenon (DRN 3.843–864) and consider the extent to which his view enables us to develop an Epicurean response to the question: what makes a person at two different times one and the same person? I offer a reading of this passage in the light of modern accounts of persistence and identity, and what (...) Lucretius states in Books 3 and 4 about memory and the soul’s motions. Guided by the metaphysical implications of this analysis, I determine the type of relation which, according to Lucretius, holds between the mental and the physical. (shrink)

A large body of information and opinion related to COVID-19 is being shared via social media platforms. Recent reports have raised concerns about the reliability and verifiability of said information being disseminated and the way systems, processes and design of the platforms facilitates such spread. This, alongside other areas of concern, has resulted in several social media platforms taking steps towards tackling the spread of mis- and dis-information. Here we discuss approaches to online public health messaging from a range of (...) sources during COVID-19, with a focus on official and non-official sources in the United Kingdom. We highlight issues for ongoing public health decisions, and the potential impact for the future course of the pandemic. (shrink)

Upon what empirical basis did Hobbes make his claims about the ‘state of nature’? He looked to ‘the savage people in many places of America’. Most people now recognize Hobbes’s assertions about Native Americans as racist. And yet, as Widerquist and McCall argue in their book Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, the myth that life outside the state is unbearable and that life under the state is better remains the essential premise of two of the most influential Western political (...) philosophies in the modern world – social contract theory and property rights theory. Critiques of these philosophies are not new. But what is new, and exciting, about this book is that a political philosopher enlists an anthropologist to systematically debunk this founding myth on the basis of empirical evidence. Despite some confusion about the book's aims, the lack of attention to women and the risk of epistemic injustice, the results are fascinating and, I will argue, should prompt a methodological crisis for some schools of political philosophy. (shrink)

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter (...) is the Web‐driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter (...) is the Web‐driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

Within the field of education management studies, recent reforms promoting devolution and choice are often seen to provide exciting new opportunities. It is claimed that the 'new' education management, with its emphasis on site-based decision-making and consumer accountability, will enable headteachers and principals to 'take control' of their schools and make them more productive environments in which to work and study. However, our review of research findings from five different countries that are putting in place devolution and choice policies suggests (...) that these new opportunities are more illusory than real. Positioned between the competing demands of the state and the market, school managers are becoming increasingly isolated from colleagues and classrooms - leading to a growing divergence between the managers and the managed. The paper considers the implication of recent developments for managers in general and for women managers in particular and concludes by discussing the relationship between the personalisation of responsibility and the legitimation of crises within the state and public education. (shrink)

While the field known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors — in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet ‘whiteness’ remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly inflected (...) by gender. This article sketches the emergence of ‘white’ femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers. In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha's ‘unhomely’, and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history. (shrink)

Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical epoch. Today, such a concept of context-transcending validity is not easy to defend; the "linguistic turn" of Western philosophy signals the widespread acceptance of the view that ideas of knowledge and validity are always mediated linguistically (...) and that language is conditioned by history and context. In Re-Presenting the Good Society, Maeve Cooke addresses the justificatory dilemma facing critical social theories: how to maintain an idea of context-transcending validity without violating anti-authoritarian impulses. In doing so she not only clarifies the issues and positions taken by other theorists--including Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler--but also offers her own original and thought-provoking analysis of context-transcending validity.Because the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity is today an integral part of critical social theory, Cooke argues that it should be negotiated rather than eliminated. Her proposal for a concept of context-transcending validity has as its central claim that we should conceive of the good society as re-presented in particular constitutively inadequate representations of it. These re-presentations are, Cooke argues provocatively, regulative ideas that have an imaginary, fictive character. (shrink)

The most fundamental challenge facing humans today is the imminent destruction of the life-generating and life-sustaining ecosystems that constitute the planet Earth. There is considerable evidence...

This article provides an overview of the nature and support provided by governments for the implementation and development of New Forms of Work Organisation. It draws on data and case studies collected by Business Decisions Ltd1 for the European Commission to illustrate the scope and impact of a sample of government programmes across 10 Member States. The paper examines the role of policy in stimulating the adoption of organisational change and helping companies to overcome obstacles with a comparison of approaches (...) taken in different countries. (shrink)

Language and Reason opens up new territory for social theorists by providing thefirst general introduction to Habermas's program of formal pragmatics: his reconstruction of theuniversal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, ...

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. Even swifter (...) is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

Our present situation of anthropogenic ecological disaster calls on Western philosophy in general, and Frankfurt School critical theory in particular, to reconsider some long-standing, entrenched assumptions concerning what it means to be a human agent and to relate to other agents. In my article, I take up the challenge in dialogue with the idea of critical theory articulated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s. My overall concern is to contribute to on-going efforts to decentre Frankfurt School critical theory in multiple (...) dimensions. With the help of Horkheimer, I seek to show that this theoretical tradition has itself an important contribution to make to the endeavour. In Section 1, I argue that the methodology he advocates for critique of society offers a view of the relationship between the human mind and reality, as well as of humans with other humans, that avoids dogmatic rigidity and is hospitable towards mutual learning through engagement with other philosophical and cultural traditions. In Section 2, I consider the more specific challenge of anthropocentrism, suggesting the need for a more differentiated account of this. While critical theory is unavoidably anthropocentric in certain respects, it could avoid more pernicious forms of anthropocentrism that establish epistemic and ethical hierarchies between humans and other-than-human entities and that conceive of ethical validity as a purely human construction, with no independence of human needs and concerns. (shrink)

Habermas dialogically recasts the Kantian conception of moral autonomy. In a legal-political context, his dialogical approach has the potential to redress certain troubling features of liberal and communitarian approaches to democratic politics. Liberal approaches attach greater normative weight to negatively construed individual freedoms, which they seek to protect against the interventions of political authority. Communitarian approaches prioritize the positively construed freedoms of communal political participation, viewing legal-political institutions as a means for collective ethical self-realization. Habermas’ discourse theory of law and (...) democracy seeks to overcome this competition between the negative and positive liberties. Doing so entails reconciling private and public autonomy at a fundamental conceptual level. This is his co-originality thesis, which seeks to show that private and public autonomy are internally connected and evenly balanced. I support his aim but argue that he fails to achieve it due to an unsatisfactory account of private autonomy. I suggest an alternative dialogical conception of autonomy as ethically self-determining agency that would enable him to establish his thesis. (shrink)

In this uplifting book, David Halpin suggests ways of putting the hope back into education, exploring the value of and need for utopian thinking in discussions of the purpose of education and school policy.

Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio-cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most (...) fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context-transcendent validity and their own anti-authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings. (shrink)

An acceptable empiricist account of laws of nature would havesignificant implications for a number of philosophical projects. For example, such an account may vitiate argumentsthat the fundamental constants of nature are divinelydesigned so that laws produce a life permittinguniverse. On an empiricist account, laws do not produce the universe but are designed by us to systematize theevents of a universe which does in fact contain life; so any ``fine tuning'' of natural law has a naturalistic explanation.But there are problems for (...) the empiricist project. This paper develops a ``perspectival'' version of the Humean bestsystem approach and argues that this version solves the standard problems faced by the empiricist project.Furthermore, the paper argues, this version is best able to answer the proponents of divine design while leaving scientificlaw a suitably objective matter.[I]t is possible tocondense the enormous mass of results to a large extent – that is to find laws which summarize...Richard Feynman It has become fashionable in some circles to argue thatscience is ultimately a sham, that we scientists read order into nature, not out of nature, and that the laws of physicsare our laws, not nature's. I believe this is arrant nonsense. You would be hard-pressed to convince a physicist thatNewton's inverse square law of gravitation is a purely cultural concoction. The laws of physics, I submit, reallyexist in the world out there, and the job of the scientist is to uncover them, not invent them. True, at any giventime, the laws you find in the textbooks are tentative and approximate, but they mirror, albeit imperfectly, a reallyexisting order in the physical world. Of course, many scientists do not recognize that in accepting the reality of anorder in nature-the existence of laws `out there' – they are adopting a theological world view. P. C. W. Davies. (shrink)