The purpose of this essay is to argue that Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 2007) has cognitive value which is inseparable from its value as a work of cinema. I introduce the cinematic philosophy debate in §1. §2 sets out my position: that the Final Cut affirms the proposition there is no necessary relation between humanity and human beings. I outline the combination of cinematic depiction with distinctive features of the narrative’s peripeteia in §3. In §4, I explain (...) the cognitive value of the peripeteia. (shrink)

To Protect and Serve is Norm Stamper’s second book, following Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005), and is a welcome contribution to the debate between those who advocate violence against the police and those who insist that no reform is necessary. Radley Balko’s The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013) inadvertently provided the context of the civil unrest in Ferguson ignited by the shooting of Michael Brown (...) in 2014 and the controversy surrounding the “Ferguson effect” provides the context for Stamper’s treatise on the problems faced – and caused – by contemporary U.S. law enforcement. Stamper is one of the few senior police officers singled out for praise by Balko, for the most part on the basis of his activism against police prejudice and militarisation subsequent to his retirement as Seattle’s police chief in 2000. (shrink)

The War on Cops is a collection of previously-published essays by Heather Mac Donald, a public intellectual in the United States who belongs to the ‘small faction’ of secular conservatives (Mark Oppenheimer, “A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives”, New York Times, February 18, 2011). The essays are journalistic rather than academic, having appeared in the City Journal, National Review, New York Daily News, InsideSources, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard, but the volume is nonetheless significant to (...) contemporary philosophers due to both its form and content. First, Mac Donald presents a logical argument for her position and makes explicit use of philosophical devices such as thought experiments. Second, this argument concerns the controversy surrounding the killing of African American males by police officers in the last three years and she provides the first sustained criticism of the rationale for the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)