This article reviews David Strauss's recent book,The Living Constitution. The thesis of Strauss's book is that constitutional law is a kind of common law, based largely on judicial precedent and commonsense judgments about what works and what is fair. In defending this claim, Strauss argues that central constitutional prohibitions of discrimination and protections of free speech have a common-law basis and that the originalist should consequently reject them. The review disputes this contention. It examines Strauss's account of the common law (...) and argues that it cannot support our First Amendment protections of subversive advocacy, as Strauss says it does. The review then offers an alternative account of the common law based on the “classical” common-law theory associated with Coke and Hale. The latter account does support our protections of subversive advocacy but is much less appealing to those distrustful of ambitious and large-scale judicial action. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

Abstract I provide an account of the nature of seemings that explains why they are necessary for justification. The account grows out of a picture of cognition that explains what is required for epistemic agency. According to this account, epistemic agency requires (1) possessing the epistemic aims of forming true beliefs and avoiding errors, and (2) having some means of forming beliefs in order to satisfy those aims. I then argue that seeming are motives for belief characterized by their role (...) of providing us with doxastic instructions guided by our epistemic aims. Understanding the nature of seemings allows us to underwrite recent epistemological work by Michael Huemer, and shows why he was right to claim that seemings are the source of all justification. I then look at some objections both to my arguments regarding the connection between seemings and justification, and to Huemer’s related “Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism”. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-21 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9830-2 Authors Matthew Skene, Syracuse University, 8330 E. Quincy Ave., I-307, Denver, CO 80237, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Categorical Prescriptiveness Uniformity as a Moral Matter Uniformity Contrasted with Neutrality The Overridingness of Moral Principles.

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming (...) certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p. (shrink)

This paper explores some surprising effects of psychological trauma on memory and develops the puzzle of observer memory for trauma. Memory for trauma tends to have a third-person perspective, or observer perspective. But it appears observer memory, by having a novel visual point of view, tends to misrepresent the past. And many find it plausible that if a memory type tends to misrepresent, it cannot yield knowledge of, or justification for believing, details of past events. But it is also plausible (...) that, with respect to details of past trauma, observer memory can yield knowledge or justification. I argue for a novel set of views that offers a way out of the puzzle: observer memory does tend to misrepresent, but it still has epistemic power regarding details of the past, although with special limits; but observer memory for trauma has other epistemic powers too, in that it allows for a kind of self-awareness. (shrink)

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

An important theme in recent experimental philosophy is that certain judgements (e.g. our judgements involving intentional action and causation) exhibit a kind of normative penetration whereby, in spite of a not-obviously-normative subject matter, they turn out to be sensitive to, and co-vary with, our normative attitudes in interesting and surprising ways. We present the results of several new experimental studies that suggest that our judgements about feasibility also appear to exhibit this kind of normative penetration in at least some cases; (...) that the best explanation of it involves attributing to subjects a certain kind of extensional error that results from conflating the question at hand with another question that is more salient given their normative attitudes; and that these conclusions have significant, though not straightforward, implications for our understanding of both normative penetration and feasibility, respectively. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

It has been argued that nonreductive physicalism’s problems with mental causation disappear if we abandon the intuitive but naïve production-based conception of causation in favor of one based on counterfactual dependence and difference-making. In recent years, this response has been thoroughly developed and defended by James Woodward, who contends that Kim’s causal exclusion argument, widely thought to be the most serious threat to nonreductive mental causation, cannot even be given a coherent formulation within Woodward’s preferred interventionist framework. But Woodward has, (...) even more recently, defended a pair of necessary conditions on mental causation and higher-order causation more generally, and it is here that the interventionist framework proves less friendly to nonreductive mental causation. Functionalism is arguably the most important species of nonreductive physicalism concerning specifically mental properties, but, as I argue, functional properties fail both of Woodward’s tests of causal relevance, one of them in two different ways. The problem, moreover, seems unique to functionalism, for other types of higher-order properties appear to pass Woodward’s tests. If functionalism faces defeat even in such friendly territory, its problems with mental causation are not an artifact of naïve metaphysics. They run deep. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

It's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative (...) activities as undertaken in pursuit of such goods; but the evidence‐guided inferences in which those activities culminate will require a different theoretical approach. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is reason to distinguish between moral responsibility and blameworthiness and, in particular, that we can acknowledge that a person is responsible for the negative outcomes of their behavior without this necessarily informing our judgments about the person’s blameworthiness. This general theme is elaborated in the context of a discussion of some of Björn Petersson’s work on collective moral responsibility.

Citizenship, with its presumptive rights, privileges and obligations, has been a fundamental challenge confronting the state since the classical Greek era and the transformation and reorganization of the centralized medieval Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years War. With the changing patterns of state formation from the large and unwieldy empires organized into absolutist states to the more nationalistic/linguistic formations a recurring issue has been the constitutional or legal guarantees of the rights of the citizen as well as his/her obligations (...) to the state. This paper engaged in a nuanced study of Plato’s Crito as it relates the contradictions of citizenship as social membership and as participation in the modern state. The primary objective was to adapt Socrates’ experience to discuss the citizenship challenge in the modern state and driven by the research question on the implications of the emergence of new challenges to the contradictions of citizenship. Social contract theory by Thomas Hobbes served as the theoretical framework. Data collection was mainly from secondary sources such as academic journals, books, newspapers and internet sources, and data analysis based on the content and textual analysis of extant and relevant literature on the subject matter. Conclusively, the study realized that citizenship in the modern state is determined largely by the protection, in various ramifications, given to the citizen by the state, but that given a change in the circumstances many would decline to die for the state. Accordingly, it recommended a mutualism in the relationship and responsibilities between that state and the citizen of the modern state, particularly the underdeveloped states of the Third World. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On David Bentley Hart's Account of TraditionMatthew LeveringIn Tradition and Apocalypse, David Hart argues that "the concept of 'tradition' in the theological sense, however lucid and cogent it might appear to the eyes of faith, is incorrigibly obscure and incoherent."1 This claim coheres with the New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann's notion of apocalyptic, as set forth in Käsemann's well known rhetorical questions—to which he answers in the negative—"Has there (...) ever been a theological system which has not collapsed? Have we been promised that we should know ourselves to be in possession of a theologia perennis?"2 For Käsemann, Christian theological "continuity" (if such there is) consists in "the hope of the manifestation of the Son of Man on his way to enthronement"3—Easter hope. Hart follows his own version of this path.Hart contends that he does not intend to overthrow the truth of the Nicene Creed.4 But he bemoans the claims of various Christian communities—Catholic, [End Page 215] Orthodox, Protestant—to have faithfully communicated the Gospel: "All Christian communions of any size or duration have their distinctive traditionalisms, their myths of continuity amidst rupture and rupture amidst continuity, their claims of doctrinal pedigree and of allegiance to the authority of the Christian past."5 Hart rejects all such ecclesial claims of dogmatic continuity and fidelity. Theologically, he deems it impossible for anyone "to say with absolute finality what the one true tradition is."6 Historically, he thinks it impossible to discern any "rational unity within the course of Christian tradition that one could confidently claim has been sustained intact amid the flux of times and cultures."7There are certain rhetorical emphases that stand out as Hart describes his own constructive view of Christian "tradition." He states that tradition is "the constant creative recollection of a promise whose fulfillment and ultimate meaning are yet to be unveiled"—not in the sense that the Church awaits the fullness that is to come and that dogmatic propositions, while true, are always inadequate to divine realities, but in the stronger sense of appealing to "a future apocalyptic horizon where the tradition's ultimate meaning is to be found" and rejecting "any reduction of that final revelation to whatever formulations of belief happen to be available at any given stage of doctrinal development." Hart depicts Christian tradition as an active transmission of a gift that remains fundamentally hidden and unknown. He invokes the image of "the impartation of a gift that remains sealed, a giving always deferred toward a future not yet known." There is a giving, but this giving is "always deferred," its future is "not yet known," and the gift itself "remains sealed." Hart argues that the "gift must remain sealed until the very end, so that the glory will not dissipate into ordinary time, whose atmosphere is incapable of sustaining and nourishing it." Time—history—cannot sustain or nourish the divine gift, and so it must be "sealed" until the end of time; and yet it can be known "in and as" ever-changing, historical tradition.8Tradition accomplishes this handing on of the sealed gift, says Hart, through its "ceaseless flow of... intertwining variations." Hart adds with regard to historicity and to "the animating impulse of the tradition": "Once that vital force has moved on to assume new living configurations, the attempt unnaturally to preserve earlier forms can achieve nothing but... the perfumed repose of a cadaver."9 The "earlier forms" that once [End Page 216] contained the "vital force" must constantly be reconfigured within tradition's "ceaseless flow."Hart pictures a destabilizing "play of tension and resolution, stability and disintegration," and he holds that we must possess a "positive desire for moments of dissolution" if we are to be faithful to "whatever is most original and most final in a tradition." Only thus can whatever is "most imperishable in a tradition... be fitfully perceived, or at least sensed," by those few persons spiritually and intellectually able to do so. By comparison, I would suggest that the core realities of faith can be much more than "fitfully perceived" or "sensed"; I think dogmatic formulations serve... (shrink)

A recent movement within political philosophy called luck egalitarianism has attempted to synthesize the right’s regard for responsibility with the left’s concern for equality. The original motivation for subscribing to luck egalitarianism stems from the belief that one’s success in life ought to reflect one’s own choices and not brute luck. Luck egalitarian theorists differ in the decision procedures that they propose, but they share in common the general approach that we ought to equalize individuals with respect to brute luck (...) so that differences in distribution are only a consequence of the responsible choices that individuals make. I intend to show that through the application of its own distributive procedures, the interpersonal luck egalitarian approach actually undermines its original motivation by making the lives of individuals subject to brute luck. I propose two alternative methods that the luck egalitarian could use to prevent the problems suffered by the interpersonal luck egalitarian standard. (shrink)

The issues and problems of mandatory vaccination policy and roll out in First Nations communities are unique and do not concern the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. These issues are also independent of more specific arguments of mandatory vaccination of healthcare workers as a condition of employment. As important as these issues are, they do not consider the complex politics of ongoing settler colonialism and First Nations community relations. In this paper, we also set aside the very real problems of (...) disinformation, hesitancy, scientific and health illiteracy, and other concerns that drive vaccine hesitancy and refusal. These affect all communities, including First Nations communities. We, instead describe the dominant arguments in favour of mandatory vaccination and critique them in terms of the disputed legitimacy of Settler-Colonial decision-making as it impacts First Nations communities. We contend cultural responsiveness and safety—not state compulsion—must remain the first principles of any engagement—including vaccination—with First Nations Peoples, families, and communities. (shrink)

From film theory to post-theory -- Sublime objects of cinema -- Class struggle in film studies -- Interlude: the pervert and the analyst -- Cinema, ideology, and form -- Enjoyment in the cinema -- Conclusion: theory as realism set in drive.

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

Michael Martin aims to affirm a certain pattern of first-person thinking by advocating disjunctivism, a theory of perceptual experience which combines naive realism with the epistemic conception of hallucination. In this paper I argue that we can affirm the pattern of thinking in question without the epistemic conception of hallucination. The first part of my paper explains the link that Martin draws between the first-person thinking and the epistemic conception of hallucination. The second part of my paper explains how we (...) can achieve Martin’s ambition without Martin’s theory. One resource that I enlist for this purpose is a naive-realist friendly conception of first-person access to experience. The metaphysical theory that I enlist is a form of naive realism that endorses an intentionalist or representationalist “common-factor” approach to veridical and hallucinatory experience. The third part of my paper briefly develops this theory. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists attempt to infer our evolved psychology from the selection pressures present in our ancestral environments. Their use of this inference strategy—often called “adaptive thinking”—is thought to be justified by way of appeal to a rather modest form of adaptationism, according to which the mind's adaptive complexity reveals it to be a product of selection. I argue, on the contrary, that the mind's being an adaptation is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for the validity of adaptive (...) thinking, and that evolutionary psychology's predictive project is in fact committed to an extremely strong and highly implausible form of adaptationism. According to this “strong adaptationism,” the macroevolutionary trajectory of a population is determined by, and therefore predictable on the basis of, the selection pressures acting upon it. Not only is this form of adaptationism prima facie highly implausible, it requires making a number of naïve and likely false assumptions concerning the nature of heritable phenotypic variation in natural populations. In particular, it assumes that phenotypic variation is inevitably small in its extent, unbiased in its direction, and copious in its quantity. Because it is unlikely that these conditions obtain as a general rule, and even more unlikely that they obtained in early human populations, I conclude that there is little reason to believe that adaptive thinking can be used to infer the current structure of our minds from evidence of past selection pressures. (shrink)

Credal reductivism is the view that outright belief is reducible to degrees of confidence or ‘credence’. The most popular versions of credal reductivism all have the consequence that if you are near-maximally confident that p in a low-stakes situation, then you outright believe p. This paper addresses a recent objection to this consequence—the Correctness Objection— introduced by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath and further developed by Jacob Ross and Mark Schroeder. The objection is that near-maximal confidence cannot entail outright (...) belief because when you believe a false proposition, you are wrong or incorrect, whereas you can be highly confident of a false proposition in a low-stakes situation without being incorrect. Both Fantl and McGrath’s and Ross and Schoeder’s versions of the Correctness Objection admit of multiple interpretations. But it is argued that even on the most charitable interpretations the objection fails. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

"Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence extends beyond academic philosophy to areas as diverse as anti-colonial movements, youth culture, literary criticism, and artistic developments around the world. Beginning with an introduction and biography of Jean-Paul Sartre by Matthew Eshleman, 42 chapters by a team of international contributors cover all the major aspects of Sartre's thought in the following key areas: Sartre's philosophical and historical context Sartre and phenomenology Sartre, existentialism and (...) ontology Sartre and ethics Sartre and political theory Aesthetics, literature and biography Sartre's engagements with other thinkers. The Sartrean Mind is the most comprehensive collection on Sartre published to date. It is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, as well as for those in related disciplines where Sartre's work has continuing importance such as literature, French studies, and politics"--. (shrink)

In the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow ( Passer domesticus) was introduced to the United States, quickly spreading across the country. For a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the observation of sparrow behavior was something of an urban pastime. Traits such as intelligence, reason, persistence, and craftsmanship were conferred onto sparrows by American urbanites. This paper argues that sparrow intelligence was often conflated with domestication: the ability of the birds to adapt to living alongside humans. (...) Praise for the ingenuity of sparrows generally revolved around their nest building, particularly when such structures overcame the challenges posed by urban infrastructure and technology. Sparrows were far less praiseworthy when they caused electricity outages or contaminated water supplies. The sparrow in the United States demonstrates how the relationship between these anecdotes and their implications for animal minds was mediated by the technology and infrastructure of cities. Admirers of sparrows were not measuring the birds’ mental capacity, but rather their ability to adapt to human habitations. Sparrows were only granted intelligence once they had demonstrated their ability to become domesticated. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are typically thought to be examples of irrational beliefs, and thus unlikely to be warranted. However, recent work in Philosophy has challenged the claim that belief in conspiracy theories is irrational, showing that in a range of cases, belief in conspiracy theories is warranted. However, it is still often said that conspiracy theories are unlikely relative to non-conspiratorial explanations which account for the same phenomena. However, such arguments turn out to rest upon how we define what gets counted (...) both as a ‘conspiracy’ and a ‘conspiracy theory’, and such arguments rest upon shaky assumptions. It turns out that it is not clear that conspiracy theories are prima facie unlikely, and so the claim that such theories do not typically appear in our accounts of the best explanations for particular kinds of events needs to be reevaluated. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers increasingly make reference to the concept of ideology to think about how representational structures can lead to oppression, and argue that the distinctively pernicious functioning of things like propaganda and generic generalizations need to be explained in terms of ideology. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to serve as an introduction to (some of) the best contemporary work on ideology in the analytic tradition. Second, it proposes a novel challenge for any such theory. The (...) challenge turns on the nature of intersectionality: it is hard to see how to render consistent the claims that ideology creates or sustains oppression with the claim that oppression is intersectional, without making substantial modifications to extant theories. The conclusion will be that certain projects in contemporary philosophy of language need to further develop their theories of ideology. (shrink)

Examining the complex role that motivation plays in creativity foregrounds the role of intrinsic motivation in paradigmatic cases of creative achievement. This is significant given the neglect of the role of motivation in the philosophical literature. Furthermore, given the way in which intrinsic motivation typically grounds and enables the cultivation of creativity for creatures like us, it pays to think of creativity in virtue-theoretic terms. As suggested by both empirical and conceptual considerations, intrinsic motivation insulates agents from pressures against or (...) inhibitors of creativity. It helps to explain robustness across different situations and influences. Conceiving of creativity as a virtue of character also makes best sense of how and why we praise or criticize as we do and shows us how to cultivate creativity. (shrink)

Locates in Schelling a new understanding of our relation to nature in philosophy.

Conspiracy theories are often portrayed as unwarranted beliefs, typically supported by suspicious kinds of evidence. Yet contemporary work in Philosophy argues provisional belief in conspiracy theories is at the very least understandable---because conspiracies occur---and that if we take an evidential approach, judging individual conspiracy theories on their particular merits, belief in such theories turns out to be warranted in a range of cases. -/- Drawing on this work, I examine the kinds of evidence typically associated with conspiracy theories, and show (...) how the so-called evidential problems with conspiracy theories are also problems for the kinds of evidence put forward in support of other theories. As such, if there is a problem with the conspiracy theorist's use of evidence, it is one of principle: is the principle which guides the conspiracy theorist's use of evidence somehow in error? I argue that whatever we might think about conspiracy theories generally, there is no prima facie case for a scepticism of conspiracy theories based purely on their use of evidence. (shrink)

Moral expressivists think that moral thoughts and sentences don’t represent or describe the world, at least not in any interesting sense. Global expressivists think that _no_ thoughts or sentences represent the world; local expressivists think that some do and others don’t. Huw Price has influentially argued that local expressivism collapses into global expressivism, due both to the effects of minimalist theories of representation and similar concepts, and to an unappreciated consequence of the success of specific expressivist theories like moral expressivism. (...) In this paper I argue that Price’s arguments don’t succeed. While they can be fixed, doing so makes them miss their intended target. Local expressivists should therefore not be worried by Price’s arguments. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are a popular topic of conversation in everyday life but are often frowned upon in academic discussions. Looking at the recent spate of philosophical interest in conspiracy theories, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories looks at whether the assumption that belief in conspiracy theories is typically irrational is well founded.

In this chapter I focus on two problems facing immigration systems around the world, and Australia in particular. The topics addressed are chosen because each one involves important fundamental rights and because significant improvement in these areas is possible even if each state acts alone, without significant coordination with others. First, I examine refugee programmes, focussing specifically on the ‘two- tier’ refugee programmes pioneered by Australia with the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas by the Howard Government in 1999. Next, I (...) look at recent declines in refugee resettlement schemes from already stingy levels and, in relation to Australia in particular, I show how the tying of resettlement numbers to the number of affirmative asylum claims granted is both wrong- headed and counterproductive. The second area of immigration policy explored is family migration, another area where immigration systems around the world have been moving in the wrong direction, often via less than transparent administrative processes. Australia is no exception. While Australia’s family migration system is reasonably good on its face, in practice there are several factors which make the programme significantly less than satisfactory from the perspective of protecting the basic rights of migrants and, arguably more importantly, citizens. These problems can and should be fixed in straightforward ways, and since doing so would be more just, would have few— if any— significant negative consequences, and in fact would have a number of clear benefits, those changes should be made. (shrink)

This book is the first English-language collection of essays by leading Camus scholars around the world to focus on Albert Camus’ place and status as a philosopher amongst philosophers, engaging with leading Western thinkers, and considering themes of enduring interest.

This paper reassesses the Cooper-Hadot debate surrounding how students are converted to philosophy as a way of life (section 1) through engagement with philosophical protreptics. In section 2, the paper identifies the core “argument from finality” in philosophical protreptics seeking to convert non-philosophers to philosophy, starting from the universal human interest in securing eudaimonia. In line with Cooper, this argument seeks to persuade prospective students on rational grounds, so that their choice to philosophise would be rationally motivated. In section 3.1, (...) the paper illustrates how in Plato's Euthydemus (a) the choice to undertake philosophy is rationally justified by Socrates, using the eudaimonistic argument from finality. In section 3.2, by recourse to Aristotle's Protrepticus, the paper shows how the protreptic texts also compared philosophy to other intellectual pursuits, notably rhetoric, so as to recommend philosophy specifically for delivering a directive wisdom concerning how to live. (shrink)