This paper uses social capital theory to explain contemporary slavery in the context of American professional sports leagues. While traditional slavery was legallyabolished in the United States (US) during the nineteenth century, using the label slavery to describe professional athletes is often dismissed because these athletes are wellcompensated performers with access to incremental compensation through commercial endorsements. As active players, athletes have opportunities to build and leverage social capital, yet, after they retire from competition, these opportunities frequently diminish. We contend (...) contemporary slavery exists for professional athletes and during their careers they are bound to their owners via “gilded cage” slavery, which is attractive to enter yet difficult to exit. We also contend that during this “bondage,” athletes build and maintain social capital; yet upon retirement, athletes are limited in opportunities to leverage socialcapital to improve their own situations or those of their communities. (shrink)

Georges Bataille (1887–1962) is one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century, whose anti-humanist anthropology influenced subsequent existentialist and post-structuralist philosophy. His wide-ranging writings (across philosophy, archaeology, economics, sociology, poetry, erotica and history of art) frequently mention children, childhood and childishness, and yet there has hitherto been little to no attention paid to this aspect of his work. This article opens up a neglected theme in Bataille studies, and also explores the consequences of Bataille's presentation of the human (...) condition for our understanding of the pedagogical relationship. Of particular interest is the idea of the agentic child, which occupies such an important place in childhood studies, educational theory and public policy. In the light of Bataille's anthropology, I shall explore the idea that the pursuit of children's agency is the victim of its vaunting ambition. (shrink)

"Most of the papers in this volume (all except for those by Steinberg, Haase, and Street) were presented at a conference...at Ryerson University in October of 2010."--p. xvii.

In reading Wittgenstein one can, and for the most part perhaps should, treat the expression ‘language-game’ as a term of art, a more or less arbitrarily chosen item of terminology meaning something like ‘an actual or possible way of using words’. It would then be a fairly routine task to work out answers to such questions as what features of the ways a word is used are emphasized by this term of art, what philosophical purposes are served by the description (...) of primitive language-games or of variations on actual language-games, or in exactly what way those purposes are supposed to be served. (shrink)

Many people seem to find it quite impossible to doubt that if a person did not do something freely, then he can be neither praised nor blamed for doing it. This assumption is shared by people with very different views about freedom, determinism and moral responsibility. It is held by most ‘libertarians’, who, to preserve moral responsibility, reject determinism. It is held by ‘hard determinists’, who accept determinism and therefore reject moral responsibility; and it is held by ‘soft determinists’, who (...) accept determinism, but argue that determinism does not exclude any kind of freedom that is relevant to whether a person may be held responsible. (shrink)

Eric G. Forbes, Lesley Murdin, & Frances Willmoth, volume 2, 1682–1703, volume 3, 1703–1719; Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol & Philadephia, 1997, 2002, pp. xlvii+1095, lxvi+1038, Price £199 each hardback, ISBN 0-7503-0391-3, 0-7503-0763-3The correspondence of John Wallis, volume 1 Philip Beeley, & Christoph J. Scriba, with the assistance of Uwe Mayer and Siegmund Probst; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. xlvii+651, Price £120 hardback, ISBN 0-19-851066-7 The Hartlib Papers. Second edition. A complete text and image database of the papers of (...) Samuel Hartlib HROnline, Sheffield, 2 CDs, Price £1,500, ISBN 0-9542608-0-5The Letters of Jan Jonston to Samuel HartlibW. J. Hitchens, Adam Matruszewski, & John Young ; Retro-Art, Warsaw, 2000, pp. 269, Price £25 paperback, ISBN 83-87992-12-7. (shrink)

This paper is, in part, a response to the model of university-based human subjects ethics review described by Bryn Williams-Jones and Soren Holm in Research Ethics Review [1] and the current ethical review process at the University of Ulster [2]. In this paper the two predominant systems of ethical review within UK universities are described. It is argued that each of these systems has significant deficiencies. Having suggested why these two models are less than ideal, a “third way’ of ethical (...) review is proposed that encapsulates the strengths of these two models while avoiding the weaknesses. (shrink)

Currently there is a widely held view that international law and its historiography did not emerge until the nineteenth century, with earlier forms of jus gentium or Völkerrecht being consigned to the status of a superseded ‘pre-history’. It is not widely understood that this view itself belongs to a particular kind of historiography–the dialectical historiography of international law–that was born in 1840s Germany, and wielded this viewpoint as a cultural-political weapon to exclude its rivals from ‘modernity’. In outlining a history (...) of this dialectical historiography, the present article focuses on the reception of Kantian and Hegelian philosophies, understood as species of Protestant rationalist metaphysics, in the juridical-political arena of the German Vormärz. Dialectical histories and theories of international law were the effects and instruments of this reception, which gave rise to the new academic subculture of philosophical international law. This subculture in turn permitted the fashioning of a new intellectual persona, the philosopher-jurist, who could claim to transcend positive treaty-based international law through personal insight into a ‘common international legal consciousness’, and to treat this insight as the threshold of ‘modern’ international law. (shrink)

This paper is about the dispositional difference that demonstrative and indexical beliefs make. More specifically, it is about the dispositional difference between my believing that NN is P (where I am NN) and my believing that I, myself, am P. Identifying a dispositional difference in this kind of case is especially challenging because those beliefs have the very same truth conditions. My question is this: how can a difference in belief that makes no difference to one’s conception of the world (...) nonetheless make a difference to one’s actions and reactions? I will argue that the dispositions associated with indexical beliefs are best of thought of as likebelief revision policies: they make no difference to the content of our conception of the world, but they govern how we canchange and revise that conception, and in so doing contribute to making rational action possible. Seeing all of this will help usto better understand how it is that first-person indexical beliefs manifest self-consciousness. (shrink)

There is more to law than rules, robes and precedents. Rather, law is an integral part of social practices and policies, as diverse and complex as society itself. Thinking About Law offers a comprehensive introduction to the ways in which law has been presented and represented. It explores historical, sociological, economic and philosophical perspectives on the major legal and political debates in Australia today. The contributors examine the position of Aborigines in the Australian legal system and the impact of the (...) Mabo case; divisions of power in Australian society and law; the question of objectivity in law; the relationship between legislation and social change; judicial decision-making and other issues. Accessibly written, Thinking About Law is essential reading for students and anyone interested in understanding our legal system. (shrink)

This paper examines the potential limitations of professional wisdom alongside those of society more generally with respect to upholding the well-being of vulnerable and marginalized people. It presents the dangers, referring to four well-documented illustrations of professional failure, that services and service systems pose when both professionals and society at large do not demonstrate sufficient measures of positive values and ethics to ensure the protection of vulnerable people within care systems. While it argues that reform of service systems and the (...) repair of such breaches are always possible, even such system reform may fail if it is not ultimately guided by wisdom not only from professionals but society itself. Several recent international examples of this wisdom are noted. It sees such wisdom as being located in the inherited values and social ethics of a society and the power of these to guide human conduct in the face of the profound and ongoing limitations of human nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACT On the cusp of the Weimar Republic’s transition to the Nazi era the production and public reception of these works of music theater by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Kaiser embody the social and ideological conditions of the time and were founded on a critique of these same conditions. Weill’s and Brecht’s opera unfolds in a mythical place which serves as a parable for capitalist utopia/dystopia, Mahagonny being the emblematic city of dreams and disillusionment. Kaiser’s play, with music (...) by Weill, takes utopian longings as its subject in various ways, from petty bourgeois aspirations to liberation for the workers. Silbersee combines a sharp political allegory about the rise of Nazism with a symbolist drama about the promise of a better world. Using examples of Weill’s music this article will explore how these works dramatize Utopia as explicitly modelled content, represented desire and transformative agency. (shrink)

One of the more recent approaches in attempting a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte has been to concentrate on his theory of interpersonality as a key to his system. But a study of Fichte’s interpersonal theory in its early forms shows, among other things, a rather surprising lack of treatment of an important form of immediate interpersonal experience: love. And yet if interpersonality lies at the core of Fichte’s philosophy, one could expect that a treatment of some (...) sort of love experience would be central to his view of the life-world. (shrink)