A critical reply to the anti-mindfulness critics in the collection, who oppose the popular secularized adoption of mindfulness on various grounds (it is not Buddhism, it is Buddhism, it is a tool of neo-capitalist exploitation, etc.), I argue that mindfulness is a quality of consciousness, opposite mindlessness, that may be cultivated through practice, and is almost always beneficial to those who cultivate it.

Two definitions of algorithm, their uses, and their implied models of computing in society, are reviewed. The first, termed the structural programming definition, aligns more with usage in computer science, and as the name suggests, the intellectual project of structured programming. The second, termed the systemic definition, is more informal and emerges from ethnographic observations of discussions of software in both professional and everyday settings. Specific examples of locating algorithms within modern codebases are shared, as well as code directly impacting (...) social and ethical concerns. The structural distinction between algorithms and social concerns is explained as mirroring the engineering construct of algorithms and data structures. It is proposed that, rather than this separation being an attempt to enforce a professional boundary and evade social responsibility, it is a crucial technical distinction within code which makes it clearer and more transparent. The power structures reinforced by the broader, cultural interpretations of algorithm are reconsidered, along with what it would mean for software to have an inclusive design culture. (shrink)

Shift work is a fixture of our 24-hour economy, with approximately 18 per cent of workers in the USA engaging in shift work, many overnight. Since shift work has been linked to an increased risk for an array of serious maladies, including cardiometabolic disorders and cancer, and is done disproportionately by the poor and by minorities, shift work is a highly prevalent economic and occupational health disparity. Here we draw primarily on the state of science around shift work and breast (...) cancer to argue that shift work represents a public health threat serious enough to warrant a precautionary stance. We use the precautionary principle to advance our case and view it as a moral compass for shift work research, empowering public health to cast shift work within the domain of health disparities deserving action despite scientific uncertainty. With the precautionary principle, we call for a deliberative decision-making process and formation of a broad shift work research collaboration to protect the health of many millions who work at night. (shrink)

In the current essay, Kevin Burke and Adam Greteman challenge this thing called love by looking at how we might instead “like” in education. Within education, multiculturalism can be viewed as a way of loving, or learning to love, diversity and, as such, learning to love the self; this tendency is notably apparent in the recent rise of concern expressed about student self-esteem. According to the authors, however, critical research on multiculturalism demonstrates how, in loving diversity, multicultural discourses (...) limn the possibilities for subjects to come into being and be liked for their differences. Drawing on James Alison's On Being Liked, Burke and Greteman reframe the problem of relating in education instead through the language of liking. How does the shift from loving to liking — either our students, our teachers, or ourselves — create different social dynamics and ethical paradigms? In engaging this question, Burke and Greteman offer an alternative model of liking that is based on the practice of cruising. (shrink)

“Ambivalence” is the key word in much of this book; “comic” [is the book’s] most obscure and I think absolutely without use value. I don’t know what B[urke] means by “comic,” as a matter of fact. I wonder if he does, and could define it briefly. Readers of Kenneth Burke are well aware of the importance of comedy and its associated cluster of concepts in his work: comic, comic frame, comic attitude, comic corrective. This cluster of terms figures prominently (...) in his 1937 book Attitudes Toward History, most notably in two key passages that scholars turn to time and again. In the first, from the “Poetic Categories” section of the book, Burke explains how different genres serve as guides for how to act in the... (shrink)

At the one extreme, social service provision by government may be seen as the work of benevolent professionals, and at the other as that of tyrannical social engineers. This paper examines the views of the libertarian economist, F.A. Hayek, and the British sociologist and philosopher, T.H. Marshall, on such provision. Marshall takes an optimistic view of the development of the professional classes in Britain and elsewhere; he sees social welfare specialists as essential to the preservation of social rights and argues (...) they should be given powers that sometimes supersede democratic preferences. Hayek, however, sees these professionals, in their drive to promote social equality, as a danger to liberty in Western democracies; he thus opposes a democratic system in which such people are allowed to attain influence. Both Hayek and Marshall raise questions about welfare and inequality and about the degree of authority social welfare professionals should be given. However, they take opposing views on the proper role of what Burke called ?natural aristocracy? (shrink)

An eloquent and sometimes even erotic book, the Philosophical Enquiry was long dismissed as a piece of mere juvenilia. However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also one of the first major works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has fascinated thinkers from Kant and Coleridge to the philosophers and critics of today. This is the only (...) available edition of the work. (shrink)

Introduction : a search for icons -- Burke in brief : a "philosophical" primer -- Old seeds, new soil : the land of Paine -- John and J.Q. Adams : federalist persuasions -- Democratic America : the ethos of liberalism -- American Whigs : a conservative response -- The Gilded Age : eclectic interpretations -- Theodore Roosevelt : blazing forward, looking backward -- Woodrow Wilson : confronting American maturity -- Modern times : conjunctions and consensus -- Natural law : (...) a neo-traditionalist revival -- The Cold War : existential threat redux -- Contemporary conservatives : victories and illusions -- Conclusion : a world without fathers. (shrink)

The article focuses on Burke’s engagement with India and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. It attempts to trace the way in which Burke, in his rhetoric on India, uses the sentimentalist vocabulary of the Scottish Enlightenment and, more particularly, the concept of sympathy. Burke, it is suggested, passes from a Humean to a Smithian understanding of sympathy, giving however, at every stage of this development, his own turn and character to the concept. Overall, Burke’s writings on (...) India reveal quite advanced for his time political reflexes and oblige us to reconsider the stereotypic image of Burke as an icon of conservatism. (shrink)

Discusses philosophers such as John Burke, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Fisher Ames, Sir Walter Scott, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, John Marshall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Randolph, James Fenimore Cooper, Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, George Gissing, Arthur Balfour, W.H. Mallock, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, George Santayana, Sir Henry Maine, and others.

2015 Reprint of 1953 Edition. Full Facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In attempting to clarify the spirit of conservatism, Kirk turns his attention to three broad fields-political philosophy, religious thought, and imaginative literature. Following Burke, whom he calls the first truly modern conservative thinker, he studies the work of John Adams, Walter Scott, Calhoun, Fenimore Cooper, Tocqueville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, George Santayana, and T.S. Eliot and others. Vigorously written, the book (...) represents conservatism as an ideology born of sound intellectual traditions. (shrink)

This is a new edition of a classic work by one of the world’s leading progressive political philosophers. Ted Honderich examines ideology and reality in British and American politics in order to establish the true distinctions of conservatism. Conservatives often claim to believe in reform, but not change, to rely on instinct rather than abstract theories. So what is the conservative rationale? Does conservatism have a philosophical founding principle that unifies it? Ted Honderich’s search for the fundamental principle of conservatism (...) is an enlightening one. He examines influential thinkers in the conservative tradition, from Edmund Burke and Adam Smith to Michael Oakeshott and Robert Nozick. He brings rigorous analytic philosophy to bear on the Republican party in the United States, and the Conservative party and the New Labour party in Britain. This lucid book, written with wit and clarity, is fully revised and updated in order to give a rigorous and complete analysis of conservatism up to the American election of 2004. Honderich’s subtle analysis is not without surprises: the book will continue to be of interest to all students of politics, and anyone who wants a broader understanding of what today’s politicians owe to the conservative tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 265-279 [Access article in PDF] The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason Vanessa L. Ryan The eighteenth-century discussion of the sublime is primarily concerned not with works of art but with how a particular experience of being moved impacts the self. The discussion of the sublime most fully explores the question of how we make sense of our experience: "Why (...) and how does this object move me?" Focusing on the perceiving subject, most critics cast the British discussion of the sublime as reflecting a gradual shift towards a Kantian focus not on the object judged, but on the judging mind. Certainly, eighteenth-century thinkers move away from understanding the sublime as a set of qualities that are presumed to be internal to a given object, and shift their attention to the mental effects of those objects. Yet the increasing interest in the perceiving subject in eighteenth-century British thought should not be understood as necessarily anticipating a Kantian perspective. In his classic work on the sublime Samuel H. Monk claims that this aspect of the British debate provides a preliminary discussion of the Kantian "autonomy of the subject" and that it constitutes a movement towards the "subjectivism of Kant." 1 This reading of British aesthetics exclusively in [End Page 265] terms of a preparation for the Kantian description of the subject obscures the differences between the British and the German traditions. It thereby fails to accommodate the reluctance of British thinkers to give up the social and ethical when faced with the sublime: instead of explaining the commonality of the aesthetic experience by positing a "disinterested" and "autonomous" subject, thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Dennis, and Edmund Burke subordinate the freedom of the individual subject in an attempt to reconcile the aesthetic affect with moral conduct.The teleological and Kantian understanding of British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is largely the result of the central position that has been given to its most famous theorist, Edmund Burke. Although Burke's conception of the sublime differs in some points markedly from that of his British contemporaries, his treatment of the sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757) has come to represent eighteenth-century British thought, and as such it is routinely compared to Kant's analytic of the sublime. Yet at the point where the British tradition seems to come closest to the Kantian, namely, in the writings of Burke, it also most clearly marks its distance from it. Burke is in some ways the least Kantian of eighteenth-century British thinkers. Whereas Kant holds that the sublime allows us to intuit our rational capacity, Burke's physiological version of the sublime involves a critique of reason. The sublime for Burke is a question not of the subject's increasing self-awareness but of the subject's sense of limitation and of the ultimate value of that experience within a social and ethical context.One of the most intransigent problems in distinguishing the strains of thought on the sublime is that the relationship between the object and its sublime effect--between the object taken to arouse heightened response and the affective quality of such a response--is so variously conceived. The sublime experience is seen as leading, on the one hand, to an overpowering of the self and, on the other hand, to an intense self-presence and exaltation, sometimes even to self-transcendence. The central question is thus not to what extent the sublime is located in the subject, but in what way the experience of the sublime affects the perceiving subject: Does the sublime enlarge us, or diminish us? 2 Does the sublime annihilate our sense of self, or does it affirm and heighten our sense of identity? These two opposing views of the effect of the sublime on the self can be seen in the contrast between Kant and Longinus, whose theories exerted an enormous influence in Britain, especially on Burke. Whereas Longinus emphasizes that the sublime overpowers and dominates the self, Kant holds that the feeling of... (shrink)

This unique anthology brings together for the first time the reactions that greeted the publication of Adam Smith's major philosophical work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Spanning over a hundred years of critical responses, the collection includes three different sections: the initial reply from Smith's friends David Hume, Edmund Burke and William Robertson the more considered opinions put forward by Smith's contemporaries, fellow Scots philosophers such as Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson or Dugald Stewart and, (...) finally, the later nineteenth-century, largely critical, views expressed by a new generation of philosophers. The book reclaims Adam Smith as a major eighteenth-century moral philosopher, giving a rare insight into the atmosphere in which his ideas emerged and evolved. --brings together a wealth of inaccessible material, from 1759 to 1881 --stresses Smith's importance not only as an innovative economist but as a major ethical thinker --includes some of Smith's replies to his critics --contributions by all the key figures of the period, including Hume, Burke, Robertson, Kames, Reid, Stewart and Ferguson. (shrink)

In this chapter, I identify a distinctive use of ‘sublime’ in Adam Smith’s philosophy of science. I show that for Smith a scientific discipline and its theories can be sublime. I trace this idea back to Malebranche. I show that in Smith it is a way to convey something about the irrational nature of the natural order lurking behind’s science’s intellectual achievements. In section 1, I diagnose and distinguish three uses of ‘sublime’ in Smith. I situate two of these (...) in the early modern discussions of the sublime in the wake of Boileau's and William Smith’s translations of Longinus. 1 I argue that the third in which Smith treats intellectual disciplines as themselves sublime is relatively distinctive, although not wholly unique to Smith. In section 2, I put this notion in context and trace it, somewhat speculatively, back to the reception of Isaac Newton by Smith and Smith’s reading of Malebranche. In the third section I conclude with some reflections on the significance of this discussion for Smith’s conception of the nature of scientific rationality. (shrink)

This paper explores what the three best-known thinkers in the sentimentalist tradition - David Hume (1711-76), Adam Smith (1723-90), and Edmund Burke (1729-97) – have to say about the topic of “dirty hands” (the view that some forms of power, used properly, lead to guilt and bad actions). Although the views of these philosophers have often been declared inconsistent, my project is to defend and resurrect key elements of their position, which may have value for this debate. I (...) contend that a coherent and unified view about dirty hands may be extracted from their work. By discussing this view, I aim to elucidate a philosophical tradition that may not be familiar to many readers today.On their sentimentalist approach, all jobs or social roles inevitably lead to characteristic varieties of wrongdoing (i.e. dirty hands), due to corruption, increased temptation and opportunity. Such inevitability does not excuse the wrongdoing, but it might diminish the appropriate level of moral blame for those at the bottom, while enhancing blame for persons at the top. (shrink)

To this, his first book, the author owed the opportunities of travel and leisure which enabled him to perfect his second, the Wealth of Nations, 1776. It has needed all the fame of the second to keep alive the memory of the first. The Moral Sentiments founded no school, and is usually passed over with the faint praise due to the author's reputation. Yet Burke welcomed its theory as “in all its essential parts just” ; and it was treated (...) by Lessing with respect, though not agreement, in the Laocoon, 1766. (shrink)

A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John (...) Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written, A Turn to Empire offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking (...) insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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Precision testing of the quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the standard model provides some of the most secure knowledge in the history of physics. These tests can also be used to constrain and search for new physics going beyond the standard model. We examine the evidential structure of relationships between theoretical predictions from QED, precision measurements of these phenomena, and the indirect determination of the fine structure constant. We argue that "pure QED" is no longer sufficient to predict the electron's anomalous (...) magnetic moment, and that standard model effects are needed. The details relevant to low-energy QED are robust against future theory change. (shrink)

A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and work Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft’s thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as (...) Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, this book restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today. The book’s format echoes one that Wollstonecraft favored in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: short essays paired with concise headings. Under titles such as “Painting,” “Music,” “Memory,” “Property and Appearance,” and “Rank and Luxury,” Tomaselli explores not only what Wollstonecraft enjoyed and valued, but also her views on society, knowledge and the mind, human nature, and the problem of evil—and how a society based on mutual respect could fight it. The resulting picture of Wollstonecraft reveals her as a particularly engaging author and an eloquent participant in enduring social and political concerns. Drawing us into Wollstonecraft’s approach to the human condition and the debates of her day, Wollstonecraft ultimately invites us to consider timeless issues with her, so that we can become better attuned to the world as she saw it then, and as we might wish to see it now. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a new methodology for normative theorising, which we call Directed Reflective Equilibrium. Directed Reflective Equilibrium is based on a taxonomy that distinguishes between a number of different functions of hypothetical cases, including two dimensions that we call representation and elicitation. Like its predecessor, Directed Reflective Equilibrium accepts that neither intuitions nor basic principles are immune to revision and that our commitments on various levels of philosophical enquiry should be brought into equilibrium. However, it also offers (...) guidance about how different types of cases ought to be sequenced to achieve this result. We argue that this ‘directional’ approach improves, in various ways, upon the non-directional approach of traditional Reflective Equilibrium. (shrink)

Ferdinand Mount has been fascinated by the great thinkers and politicians who have shaped human history over the past two millennia In this fascinating, and provocative book, he examines the proposals for a political theory from a number of widely different historical figures. Twelve key people, from the great orator and statesman of Ancient Greece (Pericles) to the inspiration of the founding of the state of Pakistan (Muhammad Iqbal) we take a colourful and rip-roaring journey through the historical figures who (...) have both inspired and provoked Mount in equal measure. The lives of men such as Jesus Christ, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Jefferson are discussed and comparisons are drawn between the various approaches each figure promoted in their works - whether philosophical, or political theories. For those wishing to be guided by Mount's choices and be swept along by his brilliantly erudite prose, this will be a particular enjoyable read. Lots of colour, humour and passion governed all these people careers and Mount brings them to life like no one else can. Praise for the international-bestselling Tears of the Rajas:- 'Mount is a skilled and fluent writer who does his subject justice' --Literary Review 'Mount relates this remarkable story with a gentle wit, a lightness of touch, a boyish enthusiasm as well as a genius for the telling pen-portrait... It is a remarkable story, and cumulatively amounts to an epic panorama of British Indian history much more substantial than the 'collection of Indian tales, a human jungle book', which Mount modestly describes as his aim in the introduction.' --William Dalrymple, The Spectator 'What [Mount] provides instead is of far greater value: a perceptive antidote to nationalistic prejudicial thinking, and an opportunity for a greater understanding of the aftereffects of British imperialism in some of the world's most troubled regions.' Sunday Times 'Although Tears of the Rajas is replete with stirring tales of adventure, it is a deeply humane book. Mount's heart is at all times with the people of India, whose lives are turned upside down by blundering attempts at modernisation.' The Times. (shrink)

We reformulate a key definition given by Wáng and Ågotnes to provide semantics for public announcements in subset spaces. More precisely, we interpret the precondition for a public announcement of ???? to be the “local truth” of ????, semantically rendered via an interior operator. This is closely related to the notion of ???? being “knowable”. We argue that these revised semantics improve on the original and offer several motivating examples to this effect. A key insight that emerges is the crucial (...) role of topological structure in this setting. Finally, we provide a simple axiomatization of the resulting logic and prove completeness. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling the information (...) gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

Industrial drug design methodology has undergone remarkable changes in the recent history. Up to the 1970s, the screening of large numbers of randomly selected substances in biological test system was often a crucial step in the development of novel drugs. From the early 1980s, such ‘blind’ screening was increasingly rejected by many pharmaceutical researchers and gave way to ‘rational drug design’, a method that grounds the design of new drugs on a detailed mechanistic understanding of the drug action. Surprisingly, however, (...) the chance-based method of random screening returned to center stage of industrial drug development in the 1990s in the form of ‘high-throughput screening’ (HTS). I will argue in this paper that this to-and-fro in the prominence of random screening comes with fundamental changes in the epistemic significance of chance experiments in pharmaceutical development. While up to the 1970s, random screening used to be chosen as an empirical search strategy primarily because suffi- cient knowledge of the mechanistic basis of drug action was lacking, it has turned with high-throughput screening into an experimental method that employs chance variation and testing to illuminate this mechanistic basis. As a consequence, research into the underlying mechanisms of drug action and the development of new drugs have become closely integrated. The rise of HTS therefore not only shows how chance experiments have assumed a new epistemic role in drug development. It also allows for a detailed study of the much debated emergence of a new relationship between scientific understanding and the development of technological artifacts. (shrink)

Smilansky notes that wrongdoers seem to lack any entitlement to complain about being treated in the ways that they have treated others. However, it also seems impermissible to treat agents in certain ways, and this impermissibility would give wrongdoers who are themselves wronged grounds for complaint. This article solves this apparent paradox by arguing that what is at issue is not the right simply to make complaints, but the right to have one's demands respected. Agents must accept the authority of (...) others to make second-personal demands on them before they can expect others to treat their own demands as legitimate. Wrongdoers’ previous wrongdoing shows they do not treat others’ demands as authoritative. However, as they are still beings with dignity, which acts as a source of moral reasons for others, wronging them remains impermissible. (shrink)

language="EN"> The eighth annual meeting of the ASSC took place between June 25th and 28th in Antwerp, an extremely beautiful Belgian city, a major European port and the home of the Peter Paul Rubens, 'the prince of painters and painter of princes'. The meeting was held in a University building at the edge of the old town. This part of the city is remarkable both for the elegance of its architecture and for its innumerable short, interlocking, streets with oddly indistinguishable (...) names. The demands on spatial memory were high and some delegates may still be hunting for the conference dinner which took place, magnificently but improbably, in a hotel - the Elzenveld - inside a hospital. (shrink)

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they (...) improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame. (shrink)

Notions of democracy and nationhood constitute the pivotal legacy of the American Revolution, but to understand their development one must move beyond a purely American context. Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland explores the simultaneous emergence of modern concepts of democracy and the nation on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of revolutions. Armin Mattes argues that in their origin the two concepts were indistinguishable because they arose from a common revolutionary impulse directed against the prevailing hierarchical political (...) and social order. The author shows how the reconceptualization of democracy and the nation, which resulted from this revolutionary impulse, received its decisive form from the French Revolution. Although the French Revolution was instrumental in redefining the two terms, however, neither were these changes confined to France, nor did the new meanings merely radiate from France to other countries. To illustrate the transatlantic emergence of these ideas, Mattes considers the works of pairs of prominent intellectual contemporaries--one in America and the other in Europe--each writing on a common topic. The thinkers and topics include Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke on the transatlantic revolutions, John Adams and Friedrich von Gentz on the mixed constitution, James Madison and Immanuel Kant on perpetual peace, and Thomas Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy on the nation. Mattes's approach highlights the significant impact that the French Revolution had on the evolution of thought in the period, demonstrating that the emergence and early development of modern concepts of democracy and the nation in America were intimately tied to revolutionary events and processes in the larger Atlantic world. Preparation of this volume has been supported by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Jeffersonian America. (shrink)

Most contemporary interpreters of Aquinas have assumed that Thomas subscribed to a “non-repeatability principle” such that created entities, once destroyed entirely, cannot be “brought back" into existence, even by God's power. Souls persisting in the interim between death and resurrection thus play an essential identity-preserving role between our death and rising again. No separated souls, no resurrection. Two of Aquinas’s best medieval interpreters, however, reject this interpretation. Leaning largely on one of Aquinas’s late quodlibetal questions, they deny that Thomas held (...) any non-repeatability principle strong enough to bar God’s resurrecting us even from complete destruction, souls and all. Here the chapter argues that careful analysis of the quodlibet and other texts largely vindicates the contemporary interpretation. It does so in a surprising way, however, since it turns out Aquinas’s non-repeatability principle applies only to corruptible, material entities like us, and not to incorruptible entities like angels. The reason Aquinas held this view, the chapter argues, is rooted in his theory of individuation. (shrink)

According to the Transparency Method, one can know whether one believes that P by attending to a question about the world—namely, ‘Is P true?’ On this view, one can know, for instance, whether one believes that Socrates was a Greek philosopher by attending to the question ‘Was Socrates a Greek philosopher?’ While many think that TM can account for the self-knowledge we can have of such a belief—and belief in general—fewer think that TM can be generalised to account for the (...) self-knowledge we can have of other propositional attitudes, such as our desires, intentions, wishes and so on. Call this the Generality Problem. In the present paper, I contrast my own attempt to solve the Generality Problem with several recent ones. I argue that in order to extend TM beyond belief, we must look to the concepts underpinning each kind of mental state. Doing so, I argue, reveals a series of outward-directed questions that can be attended to, in order to know what one desires, intends, wishes and so on. Call this the conceptual approach to extending TM. I support the conceptual approach in the present paper by showing how it generates Moore-Paradoxical sentences that are analogous to the case of belief. (shrink)