This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...) global sphere, the degree of justified partiality to compatriots, and the nature and extent of the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty and other hardships abroad. It also features articles that bring the theoretical insights of global justice thinkers to bear on matters of practical concern to contemporary societies, such policies associated with immigration, international trade, and climate change. -/- Contents: Introduction; Part I Standards of Global Justice: (i) Assistance-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: Famine, affluence and mortality, Peter Singer; We don't owe them a thing! A tough-minded but soft-hearted view of aid to the faraway needy, Jan Narveson; Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Frances Myrna Kamm. (ii) Contribution-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: 'Assisting' the global poor, Thomas Pogge; Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor?, Alan Patten; Poverty and the moral significance of contribution, Gerhard Øverland. (iii)Cosmopolitans, Global Egalitarians, and its Critics: The one and the many faces of cosmopolitanism, Catherine Lu; Cosmopolitan justice and equalizing opportunities, Simon Caney; The problem of global justice, Thomas Nagel; Against global egalitarianism, David Miller; Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique, Christian Barry and Laura Valentini. Part II Pressing Global Socioeconomic Issues: (i) Governing the Flow of People: Immigration and freedom of association, Christopher Wellman; Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders, Arash Abizadeh; Justice in migration: a closed borders utopia?, Lea Ypi. (ii) Climate Change: Global environment and international inequality, Henry Shue; Valuing policies in response to climate change: some ethical issues, John Broome; Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race, Stephen M. Gardiner; Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change, Elinor Ostrom. (iii) International Trade: Responsibility and global labor justice, Iris Marion Young; Property rights and the resource curse, Leif Wenar; Fairness in trade I: obligations arising from trading and the pauper-labor argument, Mathias Risse; Name index. -/- See: www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=483&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i d=9958&edition_id=13385. (shrink)

This essay looks to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey, as well as a contemporary political theorist, Kevin O'Leary, for some guidance in confronting the present crisis in American democratic norms and practices—including that swirling around issues of public health.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Crutchfield and Redinger argue that consciousness-altering chemical restraints are less “liberty-intrusive” (or as we will sometimes put it, just less “intrusive”) than physical restraints. Physica...

Widespread tax evasion and avoidance have recently led to both significant reforms of international tax governance and increased attention from theorists of global tax justice. Against the background of an analysis of the double challenge of effectiveness and distribution facing the taxation of multinational enterprises, this paper puts forward a taxonomy of recent contributions of the tax justice literature. This taxonomy not only opens up an original angle of interpretation on global tax justice, but also provides a vantage point from (...) which to evaluate recent reforms by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (shrink)

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are significant contributors to climate change, which poses a grave threat to social and economic systems. Our understanding of what might drive firms to reduce their emissions of these gases, however, is incomplete, and it is not clear that the knowledge gained from other environmental issues will readily apply to these emissions. We argue and find that indicators of environmental injustice previously shown to relate to toxic pollutants, for example, are poor predictors of greenhouse gas (...) emissions. Instead, we show that the degree of belief in and concern about climate change in a local community is a significant predictor of the facility’s rate of emission improvements. Furthermore, we find that beliefs at both the facility and headquarter communities influence emission reduction, and that those effects are substitutes for each other. (shrink)

Many formerly incarcerated people have civil legal needs that can imperil their successful re-entry to society and, consequently, their health. We categorize these needs and assess their association with cardiovascular disease risk factors in a sample of recently released people. We find that having legal needs related to debt, public benefits, housing, or healthcare access is associated with psychosocial stress, but not uncontrolled high blood pressure or high cholesterol, in the first three months after release.

Archaeology can provide two bodies of information relevant to the understanding of the evolution of human cognition – the timing of developments, and the evolutionary context of these developments. The challenge is methodological. Archaeology must document attributes that have direct implications for underlying cognitive mechanisms. One example of such a cognitive archaeology is found in spatial cognition. The archaeological record documents an evolutionary sequence that begins with ape-equivalent spatial abilities 2.5 million years ago and ends with the appearance of modern (...) abilities in the still remote past of 400,000 years ago. The timing of these developments reveals two major episodes in the evolution in spatial ability, one, 1.5 million years ago and the other, one million years later. The two episodes of development in spatial cognition had very different evolutionary contexts. The first was associated with the shift to an open country adaptive niche that occurred early in the time range of Homo erectus. The second was associated with no clear adaptive shift, though it does appear to have coincided with the invasion of more hostile environments and the appearance of systematic hunting of large mammals. Neither, however, occurred in a context of modern hunting and gathering. Key Words: Archaeology; evolution; Homo erectus; spatial cognition; symmetry. (shrink)

Since the 19th century, innocence has been a hallmark of childhood. The innocence of children is seen as both a sanctity worth defending and a feature that excuses the unavoidable mistakes of adolescence. While beneficial in many settings, notions of childhood innocence are often entangled with values judgements. Inherent in innocence is the notion that that which we are innocent of is undesirable. Further, attributing innocence to some implies the tolerability of blame for others. This has unique implications in a (...) medical setting. This essay explores the implications of espousing the innocence of paediatric patients. Ultimately, because attribution of innocence is both prone to bias and rooted in the same framework as blame, it degrades patient-centred care and compromises the patient–provider relationship. I argue that avoiding such characterisations may allow providers to more effectively promote paediatric health. (shrink)

This article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a complex methotrexate ethics case used in teaching a Pharmacy Law and Ethics course. Qualitative analysis of student reflective writings provided useful insight into the students’ experience and comfort level with the final ethics case in the course. These data demonstrate a greater student appreciation of different perspectives, the potential for conflict in communicating about such cases, and the importance of patient autonomy. Faculty lessons learned are also described, facilitating adoption of (...) this methotrexate ethics case by other healthcare profession educators. (shrink)

David Hilbert sought to secure the epistemic foundations of mathematics by providing consistency proofs of axiomatized mathematical theories from within the finite standpoint. This standpoint requires concrete constructions without reference to completed infinities. In 1938, Gerhardt Gentzen proved the consistency of first-order Peano Arithmetic relying on the well-ordering of certain ordinal notations. This was thought by Gentzen and Paul Bernays to be finitistically acceptable. However, a finitistically acceptable proof of the relevant well-ordering was not available until Gaisi Takeuti’s proof in (...) 1978. Beginning with the proposition that Takeuti’s proof conforms to the finite standpoint, this chapter explores the limits of a finitism based on the methods of Gentzen and Takeuti. It is argued that the upper limit is the Feferman-Schütte ordinal, and thus that finitism may be extended to strong subsystems of second-order arithmetic-systems strong enough to provide a theory of the ordinals for which Gentzen employed notations. (shrink)

The paper is about the interpretation of opaque verbs like “seek”, “owe”, and “resemble” which allow for unspecific readings of their (indefinite) objects. It is shown that the following two observations create a problem for semantic analysis: (a) The opaque position is upward monotone: “John seeks a unicorn” implies “John seeks an animal”, given that “unicorn” is more specific than “animal”. (b) Indefinite objects of opaque verbs allow for higher-order, or “underspecific”, readings: “Jones is looking for something Smith is looking (...) for” can express that there is something unspecific that both Jones and Smith are looking for. Given (a) and (b), it would seem that the following inference is hard to escape, if the premisses are construed unspecifically and the conclusion is taken on its under- specific reading: Jones is looking for a sweater. Smith is looking for a pen. Smith is looking for something Jones is looking for. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay explores key values of John Lachs's work, especially freedom, diversity, and human flourishing, when applied to the history of the philosophy of education as well as to the practical problems of policy and implementation today in American schools. I consider the importance and tensions involved in these values in the thinking of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Dewey. Next, I examine necessary and then avoidable challenges of operationalizing freedom and diversity in schools, especially in tensions with recent policy (...) initiatives that threaten freedom and diversity for human flourishing. The aim here is to note the central importance of the values that Lachs has long championed, while attending also to the risks and dangers that misunderstanding and narrow thinking pose about them when applied to American public schools. Ultimately, I argue that while advocacy for liberty sometimes raises profound problems in the sphere of public education, democratic education is enriched immeasurably when it enables and empowers freedom to pursue diverse forms of flourishing. (shrink)

In this book Han Thomas Adriaenssen offers the first comparative exploration of the sceptical reception of representationalism in medieval and early modern philosophy. Descartes is traditionally credited with inaugurating a new kind of scepticism by saying that the direct objects of perception are images in the mind, not external objects, but Adriaenssen shows that as early as the thirteenth century, critics had already found similar problems in Aquinas's theory of representation. He charts the attempts of philosophers in both periods (...) to grapple with these problems, and shows how in order to address the challenges of scepticism and representation, modern philosophers in the wake of Descartes often breathed new life into old ideas, remoulding them in ways that we are just beginning to understand. His book will be valuable for historians interested in the medieval background to early modern thought, and to medievalists looking at continuity with the early modern period. -/- . (shrink)

This textbook introduces undergraduate students of language and linguistics to the basic ideas, insights, and techniques of contemporary semantic theory. The book starts with everyday observations about word meaning and use and then gradually zooms in on the question of how speakers manage to meaningfully communicate with phrases, sentences, and texts they have never come across before. Extensive English examples provide ample illustration.

The essays in this book began as a contributions to a Summer Workshop arranged by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, and haled at the University of Calgary from July 7 to 14, 1978. The Institute, which was founded by the University in 1976 for the encouragement of humanistic studies, has held such conferences each summer as a part of its programme of research.

Contrary to some recent self-styled “linguistic pragmatists” who seek to dispense with the purportedly obsolete term “experience”. this essay attempts to show that pragmatism cannot cogently dispense with experience, understanding that term in its Deweyan sense as “culture” and not some sort of mentalistic perception or state. Focusing on Robert Brandom’s recent Perspectives on Pragmatism, I show how the very assumptions that Dewey meant to call into question with his “instrumentalist turn” in 1903 are enshrined in Brandom’s “new and improved” (...) form of pragmatism. Judged in terms of its pragmatic consequences, Brandom’s linguistic pragmatism returns to the well trodden paths and problems of analytic philosophy and not the radical approach that Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (Dewey’s name for his philosophy) offers. The fundamental issue is not, I contend, between types of pragmatism at all but between conceptions of human nature and what a human life is. John Stuart Mill once said of Bentham that, for an empiricist, he had really very little experience, especially of human nature. I am afraid that the same judgment here is passed on those wishing to dispense with experience and somehow retain pragmatism. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context dependence, essentially originating with Kaplan (1989)--with a little help from Stalnaker (1978) (...) and Lewis (1979a, 1980), and various predecessors including Kamp (1971) and Vlach (1973). The current article overlaps in content with the account in Zimmermann (1991), which is however much broader (and at times deeper).. (shrink)

Although normative systems, or social laws, have proved to be a highly influential approach to coordination in multi-agent systems, the issue of compliance to such normative systems remains problematic. In all real systems, it is possible that some members of an agent population will not comply with the rules of a normative system, even if it is in their interests to do so. It is therefore important to consider the extent to which a normative system is robust, i.e., the extent (...) to which it remains effective even if some agents do not comply with it. We formalise and investigate three different notions of robustness and related decision problems. We begin by considering sets of agents whose compliance is necessary and/or sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of a normative system; we then consider quantitative approaches to robustness, where we try to identify the proportion of an agent population that must comply in order to ensure success; and finally, we consider a more general approach, where we characterise the compliance conditions required for success as a logical formula. We furthermore introduce a logic for specifying properties of norm compliance in general and norm robustness in particular. (shrink)

This paper provides a close reading of Erwin Straus’ “The Upright Posture” from a disability studies perspective. Straus argues that the upright posture dominates the human world. But he excludes those who dwell in it otherwise. By reviewing phenomenological disability literature, this paper asks what a disabled phenomenology would look like, one rooted in the problem of inclusion from the outset. Disabled phenomenology addresses ‘subjectivity’ critically, asking: what socio-material arrangements make subjectivity possible in the first place? This project is, I (...) argue, equal parts political economy and existential phenomenology. I conclude with some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This edited collection includes contributions from expert philosophers of law and considers the work of one of the most important legal philosophers of our time, Professor Gerald J Postema. The chapters dig deep into important camps of Postema's rich theoretical project including: - the value of the rule of law; - the ideal of integrity in adjudication; - his works on analogical reasoning; - the methodology of jurisprudence; - dialogues with Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Frederick Schauer and HLA Hart. It (...) includes an original article by Professor Postema, in which he develops his conception of the rule of law and replies to some objections to previous works, and an interview in which he provides a fascinating and unique insight into his philosophy of law. (shrink)

When do people say that they are moved, and does this experience constitute a unique emotion? We review theory and empirical research on being moved across psychology and philosophy. We examine feeling labels, elicitors, valence, bodily sensations, and motivations. We find that the English lexeme being moved typically (but not always) refers to a distinct and potent emotion that results in social bonding; often includes tears, piloerection, chills, or a warm feeling in the chest; and is often described as pleasurable, (...) though sometimes as a mixed emotion. While we conclude that it is a distinct emotion, we also recommend studying it in a more comprehensive emotion framework, instead of using the ambiguous vernacular term being moved as a scientific term. (shrink)

Disability studies has begun to employ Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism, as a means to challenge the exclusionary model of man, dominant both in the academy and in everyday life. Braidotti argues that we must embrace a new form of subjectivity to effectively address the academic, environmental and species challenges characterizing the posthuman condition. This critical posthuman subject is inspired, in part, by Baruch de Spinoza, read as a monistic philosopher of difference. In this article, I compare Braidotti’s posthuman philosophy with Spinoza’s (...) Ethics, read through a Deleuzian lens. The two projects are extremely different. My arguments are twofold: first, that Braidotti’s subjective reading overlooks Spinoza’s anti-subjective rationalism; and, second, that we must be cautious about Braidotti’s demands that we jettison all vestiges of man from philosophy, exploring disability or anything else. I make my case using the example of phenomenology. I end by asking what an expanded understanding of Spinoza’s philosophy means for disability studies, for posthumanism and for other forms of radical philosophy in the future. (shrink)

Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology.

Historians have long since rejected the dubious assertions of the conflict model, with its narratives of perennial religion versus science combat. Nonetheless, this theory persists in various academic disciplines, and it is still presented to university students as the authoritative historical account of religion–science interactions. Cases of this can be identified within modern anthropology textbooks and reference materials, which often recapitulate claims once made by John W. Draper and Andrew D. White. This article examines 21st-century introductory anthropology publications, demonstrating how (...) such works perpetuate religion–science myths and the notion that history has been replete with inevitable religion versus science warfare. In particular, this study reveals how such introductory materials propagate discord narratives associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Affiliated with these anecdotes are oversimplified accounts of religious responses to heliocentrism and evolutionary theory, as well as claims that science has invariably led to the usurpation of religious belief and secularization from Galileo onwards. (shrink)

By the term ‘New Atheism’ several authors and their books are subsumed under one label, most prominently The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, and God Is Not Great: Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. Besides an introduction to the ideas expressed in these books and the reception of the ‘New Atheists’ in the public discourse, the (...) article comprises a criticism of the label ‘New Atheism’. (shrink)

In this paper, I combine the actor-network economic sociology of disability with recent developments in phenomenological, embodied cognitive science, to discuss how ability, calculative agency, and meaning are distributed throughout materially situated sociocognitive systems. I begin by outlining the actor-network approach to disability, market formation, and economic agency. Next, I turn to the cognitive sciences, and describe the emergence of consciousness and meaning in embodied human being. With an operative synthesis of the two projects in place, I turn to government-organized (...) disability savings plans in Canada. I suggest that the low uptake of these plans can be explained using the theoretical synthesis provided in the first two sections of this paper, giving a robust account of the threefold distribution of ability, calculative agency, and meaning. (shrink)

This paper uses an ongoing ethnography of childhood rehabilitation to rethink the Heideggerian phenomenology of death. We argue that Heidegger’s threefold perishing/death/dying framework offers a fruitful way to chart how young people, their parents, and practitioners address mortality in the routine management of muscular dystrophies. Heidegger’s almost exclusive focus on being-towards-death as an individualizing existential structure, rather than the social life with and around death, is at odds with the clinical experience we explore in this paper. After looking to the (...) basic structures of Heidegger’s philosophy of death, we point to recent work by Leder, Svenaeus, Aho, and Carel, bringing health and the spaces of healthcare into our purview. Turning to ethnographic data, we argue that a revised phenomenology of death gives a nuanced account of how health care practitioners address death, dying, and perishing, and outline some steps toward a more ontologically sensitive clinical space. These revisions are in line with recent work in disability studies, that see disability as more than a death sentence. We advocate adjusting phenomenological reflections on disability, to be framed as a way of life, rather than as a deficient or especially deadly mode of human existence. (shrink)

Tragedy is a founding theme in disability studies. Critical disability studies have, since their inception, argued that understandings of disability as tragedy obscure the political dimensions of disability and are a barrier facing disabled persons in society. In this paper, we propose an affirmative understanding of tragedy, employing the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Hasana Sharp. Tragedy is not, we argue, something to be opposed by disability politics; we can affirm life within it. To make our case, we look (...) to an ongoing ethnography of two Canadian children’s rehabilitation clinics. Looking to the clinical experience of Canadian boys and young men diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and those of their families, we show how this affirmative understanding of tragedy allows us to pursue the themes of disability politics within tragedy. Contrary to an optimism that would eschew tragedy at all costs or a pessimistic approach that declines to act in the face of tragic circumstance, we argue that a revised understanding of tragedy allows us to situate the occasionally-tragic clinical experience of disability in a philosophy of life. Both disability and tragedy point us to the shared entanglements that make life what it is. (shrink)

Anvendt etik har i for ringe grad interesseret sig for de procedurale og refleksive aspekter ved det som i artiklen kaldes den forhandlede normdannelse. Diskursetikken således som den udvikles hos Jürgen Habermas kan fungere som teoretisk ramme for en sådan analyse. Artiklen præsenterer en undersøgelse af det svenske Gentekniknævn med henblik på at vise hvorledes den forhandlede normdannelse foregår i dette nævn. Artiklen konkluderer på baggrund heraf at den forhandlede normdannelse peger på et bredere politisk spørgsmål om mulighedsbetingelserne for et (...) deliberativt demokrati. I denne optik er anvendt etik ikke primært et spørgsmål om applicering af normer eller principper, men om studiet af mulighedsbetingelserne og formerne for en kollektiv evaluering af det normative grundlag for konkrete handlinger. (shrink)