This paper addresses the leitmotif of Alan Holland's work, which is argued here to be a defence of the existence and worth of nonhuman nature. Definitions of politics have always depended on the idea of nature as a contrasting non-political realm, usually turning on the centrality of speech. Referencing the work of Aristotle, Kant and Bentham, I suggest that the instability of the distinction between the human and the nonhuman means that politics, as ‘thing and activity', must itself be (...) unstable. The question of whether there can be a politics without nature is explored through an analysis of the work of Latour, and the conclusion is reached that listening may well be just as important as speaking. (shrink)

Andrew Dobson has outlined three conceptions of environmental sustainability: the ‘critical natural capital’ conception; the ‘irreversibility’ conception; and the ‘natural value’ conception. He has also attempted to map out the various ‘dimensions of social justice’– his purpose in so doing being to analyze the ‘encounter’ of each conception of environmental sustainability with the points on his map. Not surprisingly, Dobson concludes that as one moves from the ‘critical natural capital’ conception through the ‘irreversibility’ conception to the ‘natural value’ (...) conception of ‘sustainability’, the ‘points of contact’ with his map of ‘the dimensions of social justice’ are found to ‘become fewer and further apart’. In this article I argue that Dobson is fundamentally confused in his reason for thinking why this is so. I also argue that a core argument he deploys concerning future generations cannot do the work he requires of it. (shrink)

Cutting a cake, dividing up the property in an estate, determining the borders in an international dispute - such problems of fair division are ubiquitous. Fair Division treats all these problems and many more through a rigorous analysis of a variety of procedures for allocating goods, or deciding who wins on what issues, when there are disputes. Starting with an analysis of the well-known cake-cutting procedure, 'I cut, you choose', the authors show how it has been adapted in a number (...) of fields and then analyze fair-division procedures applicable to situations in which there are more than two parties, or there is more than one good to be divided. In particular they focus on procedures which provide 'envy-free' allocations, in which everybody thinks he or she has received the largest portion and hence does not envy anybody else. They also discuss the fairness of different auction and election procedures. (shrink)

The authors develop an axiomatic theory of nonexistent objects and and give a formal semantics for the language of the theory.

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

To understand what ontologies do through their definitions, we propose a theoretical explanation of the functions of definitions in ontologies backed by empirical neuropsychological studies. Our goal is to show how these functions should motivate (i) the systematic inclusion of definitions in ontologies and (ii) the adaptation of definition content and form to the specific context of use of ontologies.

This paper presents an account of the moral boundaries of organizations. We define an organization’s moral boundary to encompass all of the actions for which it could be held morally responsible. Our theory requires us to view organizations as subjects that act in the world, rather than as objects that are used as tools; that is, it requires us to focus on corporate moral agency. We present a process model for determining whether a given action lies within an organization’s moral (...) boundary, and we discuss how an organization’s moral boundary can be created, destroyed, or modified as a result of deliberate choices by human and organizational actors. Our article contributes to the literature by conceptualizing the distinction between organizations as subjects and organizations as objects, and so clarifying the distinction between legal and moral boundaries; by recentering the discussion of boundaries on organizational actions rather than on contingent institutional features; and by adding nuance to the assignment of moral responsibility in complex organizational networks and in situations where one corporate moral agent depends upon another for its existence. (shrink)

Jewish by birth, though from a secular family, Alan Morinis took a deep journey into Hinduism and Buddhism as a young man. He received a doctorate for his study of Hindu pilgrimage, learned yoga in India with B. K. S. Iyengar, and attended his first Buddhist meditation course in the Himalayas in 1974. But in 1997, when his film career went off track and he reached for some spiritual oxygen, he felt inspired to explore his Jewish heritage. In his (...) reading he happened upon a Jewish tradition of spiritual practice called Mussar. Gradually he realized he had stumbled on an insightful discipline for self-development, complete with meditative, contemplative, and other well-developed transformative practices designed to penetrate the deepest roots of the inner life. Eventually reaching the limits of what he could learn on his own, he decided to seek out a Mussar teacher. That was not easily achieved, since almost the entire world of the Mussar tradition had been wiped out in the Holocaust. In time, he did find an accomplished master who stood in an unbroken line of transmission of the Mussar tradition, and who lived at the center of a community of Orthodox Jews on Long Island. This book tells the story of Morinis’s journey to meet his teacher and what he learned from him, and reveals the central teachings and practices that are the spiritual treasury and legacy of Mussar. Alan Morinis has written this book because the wisdom and practices that helped him so much have not penetrated the world beyond the confines of Orthodox Judaism, and may not be fully appreciated even there at this time. His hope is that Jews and non-Jews alike will find in Mussar a time-tested path of spiritual practice that will help them discover the hidden radiance within. (shrink)

Students of the Enlightenment have long assumed that the major movement towards atheism in the Ancien Régime was centered in the circle of intellectuals who met at the home of Baron d'Holbach during the last half of the eighteenth century. This major critical study shows, contrary to the accepted views, that in fact, atheism was not the common bond of a majority of the members and that, far from being alienated figures, most of the members were privileged and publicly successful (...) citizens devoted to peaceful and gradual reform. Alan Charles Kors determines the coterie's membership and discovers it to have been a diverse assemblage of philosophes, men of letters, and scientists. Analyzing the thought and behavior of those members who lived past 1789, the author argues that the hostility to the Revolution expressed by the coterie's survivors was fully consistent with their world view. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

One striking point of similarity is this: there is a sense in which we feel we do not know what we are talking about. By this we mean that our remarks to follow do not constitute a theory. And as evidence for this contention we cite the fact that we have no logically valid arguments to support what we say. To be sure, we believe ourselves to be in very good company in this respect, at least as far as the (...) behavioral sciences and systems of synthetic philosophy are concerned--we do not believe others know what they are talking about either. Whitehead, for example, gives us very few arguments in favor of his metaphysics--he just tells us how the world looks to him. In this paper we will be presumptuous enough to try to tell you how the world looks to us. At worst the picture we want to draw will be misleading; at best it may suggest some experimental or formal problems of interest. (shrink)

This unparalleled reference work offers general readers as well as scholars clearly written introductions to over seven hundred of the main religious and philosophical writings of Greco-Roman paganism, early Judaism, and formative Christianity from the period of Alexander the Great to Mohammed.

Let φ be a monadic second order sentence about a finite structure from a class K which is closed under disjoint unions and has components. Compton has conjectured that if the number of n element structures has appropriate asymptotics, then unlabelled (labelled) asymptotic probabilities ν(φ) (μ(φ) respectively) for φ always exist. By applying generating series methods to count finite models, and a tailor made Tauberian lemma, this conjecture is proved under a mild additional condition on the asymptotics of the number (...) of single component K-structures. Prominent among examples covered, are structures consisting of a single unary function (or partial function) and a fixed number of unary predicates. (shrink)

Over 25 years ago, the first author conjectured in [15] that the existence of arbitrarily large primes is provable from the axioms I Δ₀(π) + def(π), where π(x) is the number of primes not exceeding x, IΔ₀(π) denotes the theory of Δ₀ induction for the language of arithmetic including the new function symbol π, and de f(π) is an axiom expressing the usual recursive definition of π. We prove a modified version in which π is replaced by a more general (...) function ξ that counts some of the primes below x (which primes depends on the values of parameters in ξ), and has the property that π is provably Δ₀(ξ) definable. (shrink)

How foreign policy embodies human values is an issue worth studying. Such a value not only refers to the interests of social and political elites but to the prevailing welfare of people. In 2016, t...

Pluractionality (PLR) is the morphological category that generally signifies multiple actions. This paper, based on original fieldwork, provides the first investigation of PLR in Chechen, a Nakh language spoken in the eastern central part of the North Caucasus. The data reflects the standard dialect of Chechen spoken in and near the cities of Murus-Martan and Grozny. Chechen PLR, which is marked by stem vowel alternations, prototypically signifies the repetition of an event (e.g., saca/sieca `to stop once/many times'; laaca/liica `to catch (...) once/many times'). The plurality of the nominative argument can affect the interpretation of some verbs (e.g., ghitta `to wake up'; hitta `to assume a standing position'), rendering the reading distributive. More interestingly, a durative reading, signaling the prolongation of an event, is available for some verbs (e.g., xouzha/xiizha `to ache momentarily/for a while', zouza/ziiza `to itch momentarily/for a while') but not others. Following Ojeda (1998) and Lasersohn (1995), PLR is accounted for in terms of the pluralization of the event argument of a predicate. The various semantic effects are the results of interactions between the aspectual properties of individual verbs and event pluralization. (shrink)

Intentionalism must be distinguished from computational psychology. The former is a mentalist-realist metatheoretical stance vis-a-vis the latter, which is a research programme devoted to the construction of informationally-characterized simulation models for human behavior, perception, cognition, etc. Intentionalism has its attractive aspects, but unfortunately it is plagued by severe conceptual difficulties. Recent attempts to justify the intentionalist interpretation of computational models, by J.A. Fodor and by C. Graves, J.J. Katz et al., fail to secure a conceptually adequate and genuinely intentional sense (...) for the intentional idiom they employ. (shrink)

Lecture 1. Locke's theory of knowledge, guest lecture / by Alan Kors ; lecture 2. Locke's political theory, guest lecture / by Dennis Dalton ; lecture 3. montesquiey and the beginnings of political science ; lecture 4. Berkeley's idealism and the critique of materialism ; lecture 5. Hume's epistemiology ; lecture 6. Hume's theory of morality ; lecture 7. Smith's wealth of nations ; lecture 8. Rousseau's dissent, the challenge to the idea of progress, guest lecture / by (...) class='Hi'>Alan Kors ; lecture 9. Kant's copernicus revolution, epistemiology and the critique of metaphysics ; lecture 10. Kant's moral philosophy ; lecture 11. Burke and the birth of enlightened conservatism ; lecture 12. naturalism and materialism, the boundaries of the enlightenment, guest lecture. (shrink)

'Andrew Dobson's book meets the need for an accessible introduction to green political thought ... a useful and interesting book.'- Environmental Politics.

The idea that there might be “limits to growth” is a key and contested feature of environmental politics. This chapter outlines the limits to growth thesis, describes and assesses critical reactions to it, and comments upon its relevance today. It argues that, after an initial highpoint in the early 1970s, the thesis declined in importance during the 1980s and 1990s under criticism from “ecological modernizers” and from environmental justice advocates in the global South who saw it as way of diverting (...) blame for ecological problems from the rich and powerful to the poor and dispossessed. “Peak oil” and climate change have, though, given renewed impetus to the idea, and this has given rise to new discourses and practices around “sustainable prosperity” and “degrowth.”. (shrink)

This highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition, having been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas which have grown in importance since the third edition was published. Andrew Dobson describes and assesses the political ideology of ‘ecologism’, and compares this radical view of remedies for the environmental crisis with the ‘environmentalism’ of mainstream politics. He examines the relationship between ecologism and other political ideologies, the philosophical basis of ecological (...) thinking, the potential shape of a sustainable society, and the means at hand for achieving it. New to this edition: analysis of an intellectual and political 'anti-environment' backlash an account of sustainability in ecological thought the effect of globalization on ecologism ecological citizenship expanded bibliography. Green Political Thought remains the starting point for all students,academics and activists who want an introduction to green political theory. (shrink)

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - with which we have been bequeathed. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these (...) duties are owed non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview Alan Norrie discusses how he became involved with Critical Realism, his work on Dialectical Critical Realism, and responses to it amongst the Critical Realist communi...

In this paper, we propose a mathematical model of subjective experience in terms of classes of hierarchical geometries of representations (“n-awareness”). We first outline a general framework by recalling concepts from higher category theory, homotopy theory, and the theory of (infinity,1)-topoi. We then state three conjectures that enrich this framework. We first propose that the (infinity,1)-category of a geometric structure known as perfectoid diamond is an (infinity,1)-topos. In order to construct a topology on the (infinity,1)-category of diamonds we then propose (...) that topological localization, in the sense of Grothendieck-Rezk-Lurie (infinity,1)-topoi, extends to the (infinity,1)-category of diamonds. We provide a small-scale model using triangulated categories. Finally, our meta-model takes the form of Efimov K-theory of the (infinity,1)-category of perfectoid diamonds, which illustrates structural equivalences between the category of diamonds and subjective experience (i.e.its privacy, self-containedness, and self-reflexivity). Based on this, we investigate implications of the model. We posit a grammar (“n-declension”) for a novel language to express n-awareness, accompanied by a new temporal scheme (“n-time”). Our framework allows us to revisit old problems in the philosophy of time: how is change possible and what do we mean by simultaneity and coincidence? We also examine the notion of “self” within our framework. A new model of personal identity is introduced which resembles a categorical version of the “bundle theory”: selves are not substances in which properties inhere but (weakly) persistent moduli spaces in the K-theory of perfectoid diamonds. (shrink)

In recent years the engagement between the environmental 'agenda' and mainstream political theory has become increasingly widespread and profound. Each has affected the other in palpable and important ways, and it makes increasingly less sense for political theorists in either camp to ignore what the other is doing. This book draws together the threads of this interconnecting enquiry in order to assess its status and meaning. Dobson and Eckersley, two renowned scholars in this field, have commissioned an internationally recognised (...) group of political theory scholars to think through the challenge that political ecology presents to political theory. Looking at fourteen familiar political ideologies and concepts such as liberalism, conservatism, justice, and democracy, the contributors question how they are re-shaped, distorted or transformed from an environmental perspective. Lively, accessible and authoritative, this book will appeal to professional scholars and students alike. (shrink)