I argue that, contrary to how he is often read, Spinoza did not believe that the mind and the body were numerically identical. This means that we must find some alternative reading for his claims that they are 'one and the same thing'.

With its broad scope and deep study of the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophy of physics, this book is not intended primarily for specialists, but ...

We study companies that do not produce a sustainability report in contexts where institutionalisation is assumed. Based on a careful analysis of interaction patterns between non-reporting companies, sustainability interest groups, and peer organisations, we find patterns of discursive and material isomorphism that suggest sustainability reporting is confined to an issues-based field, rather than spreading as an institutionalised practice across the business community. We argue that the issues-based field exerts only weak pressure for sustainability reporting, and that encouraging more firms to (...) report rests on understanding what influences companies to interact more widely to become part of this field. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOscar Larsson’s sympathetic critique of constructivist institutionalism calls for a clarification of my understanding of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and their mutual interdependence. That interdependence lies at the heart of any genuinely constructivist approach, just as the interdependence of structure and agency lies at the heart of any genuinely institutionalist approach. As such, I reject the charge of subjectivism just as I would that of voluntarism. Building on the social ontology of Berger and Luckmann, we can distinguish between subjectivity and intra-subjectivity and (...) proceed to show how the latter implies a notion of inter-subjectivity. An example of the social construction of a political crisis shows that social facts are made and remade through a fusion of inter- and intra-subjectivities. (shrink)

This article offers an account of at least some of the non-preparatory dimensions of education and their significance for a theory of educational justice. I argue that just schools should play a role in facilitating goods of childhood. I also defend an egalitarian view about the access children should have in school to the resources and opportunities associated with the non-preparatory dimensions of education.

In this paper we argue that there is much to learn about “wild justice” and the evolutionary origins of morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living mammals. Because of its relatively wide distribution among the mammals, ethological investigation of play, informed by interdisciplinary cooperation, can provide a comparative perspective on the evolution of ethical behavior that is broader than is provided by the usual focus on primate sociality. Careful analysis of social play reveals rules of (...) engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. Because of its significance in development, play may provide a foundation of fairness for other forms of cooperation that are advantageous to group living. Questions about the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality are best answered by attention to the details of what animals do when they engage in social play – how they negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, and to develop trust. We consider questions such as why play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does “being fair” mean being more fit? Do individual variations in play influence an individual’s reproductive fitness? Can we use information about the foundations of moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? We conclude that there is likely to be strong selection for cooperative fair play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play, to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that individuals are, prior to the existence of just institutions requiring that they do so, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or share the benefits fairly of any use beyond their entitlements, of the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases (EAC) to within a specified justifiable range. As part of the search for an adequate account of climate morality, I approach the task by revisiting, and drawing inspiration from, two (...) prominent models from classical political philosophy for thinking about norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding “pre-institutional” appropriation of unowned resources; Locke and Kant, respectively. The basic resources they develop—connected to fundamental norms of equality and rights to self-preservation and freedom—in order to generate their particular schema for distributive shares prior to the existence of just institutions can be usefully and plausibly connected up with the scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable, global, and unowned resource that is EAC in order to undergird a picture of individual climate duties in the contemporary world. It is a picture that comes with some fairly radical implications, especially for the well-off. (shrink)

This guest column consists of a tongue-in-cheek counterfactual history of England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its highlight is the fifty-year reign of the saintly King Richard III, who dies a martyr in New York at the hands of the Iroquois in 1536 and is promptly canonized. In this version of events, England evades the Reformation and the wars of religion and enters modernity as a prosperous nation of small farmers who have no interest in enclosures and engrossing, (...) let alone in capitalism and industrialization. (shrink)

This paper explores tensions in Ronald Dworkin's liberal theory (and liberalism more generally) about the appropriate relationship of the state to the different conceptions of the good that may be adopted by its citizens. Liberal theory generally supposes that the state must exhibit a kind of impartiality to different conceptions of the good. This impartiality is often thought to be captured by an anti-perfectionist ideal of liberal neutrality. But neutrality is often criticized as an ideal that lacks adequate theoretical support (...) and is difficult to reconcile with liberalism's commitment to government support of various elements of a community's culture. Nonetheless, Dworkin has tried to explain systematically how his egalitarian brand of liberalism can explain the appropriateness of a particular variety of neutrality. I argue, however, that Dworkin's account of the relationship between liberalism and the good is ambiguous. I suggest that an ideal of tolerance which embraces a mild form of perfectionism fits better with the egalitarian foundations of Dworkin's liberalism than neutrality. Moreover, tolerance is an ideal through which familiar tensions about the liberal state's relationship to the good may be resolved. (shrink)

In the context of an issue of Common Knowledge dedicated to instances of experimental scholarship and to discussion of them, this contribution by a social historian of medieval England sets out to demonstrate that an empirical alternative to tendentious and interpretive historiography, despite all claims to the contrary, is possible and valuable. In this monograph-length article, the texts of selected documents in the Adair Family Collection are set forth, often verbatim, and, though minutely contextualized, are subjected to only the lightest (...) analysis. Scant thematic cues organize this in-depth exploration of the wills, deeds of purchase, quitclaims, rentals, indentures, receipts, charitable bequests, and other legal and commercial transactions of John Tasburgh I, his wife Margery, John Tasburgh II, his wife Olive, and their families, dependents, assigns, and parishes. Peripheral attention is paid to the better-known John Hopton and to the family of John Paston I, II, and III. Richmond's own readings of texts and circumstances appear largely in the form of questions, as if he were writing marginalia for his own later use while reading. Thus, the historian does all the archival work necessary for readers to arrive at their own hypotheses about how rurality related to urbanity in fifteenth-century Suffolk and, perhaps, also about the meaning of the word urbane. (shrink)

Colin McGinn _Ethics, Evil, and Fiction_ Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 ISBN 0198237162 (hb) 0198238770 (pb) x + 186 pp.

Many traditional arguments in favor of enhancement are consequentialist in nature. Many of the classic arguments against enhancement seem to have loosely Kantian origins. In this paper I offer a different interpretation of what a Kantian should be committed to with respect to enhancement by focusing on Kant's sometimes overlooked imperfect duty to cultivate our talents. I argue that in promoting an end that Kant thinks we have a duty to set, enhancing is more than just permissible, but has morally (...) weighty reasons behind it and would in part constitute a duty we owe to ourselves. This shows that Kantians have a unique position to add to debates about enhancement and positions Kant as pushing a view that is potentially more radical than even most ethicists friendly to enhancement, who might grant that enhancement is permissible in a wide array of cases, but often fall short of judging it part of a duty we owe to ourselves. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the role of general models for language change and considers four such classes of model. The farming/language dispersal model is a frequent case for language replacement. But problems of chronology frequently obscure the relationships between archaeological and linguistic data.

To commemorate the five hundreth anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII to the English throne, this guest column reviews the inventories made, upon his death, of the king's possessions at Hampton Court, the Tower, and other locations. Focusing on extensive equipment for royal-games playing, especially for “tennys,” this paper is essentially a list of possessions that evidence the blend of frivolity and cruelty characteristic of Henry's self-indulgent reign.

This essay takes the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory as a test case for the applicability of Thomas Kuhn's notion of “paradigm shifts” to the history of culture. While Kuhn apparently found inspiration in the disciplines of cultural and art history for his idea that scientific progress is noncumulative, the arts and humanities (unlike the sciences) must deal with the ideas of (and the evidence for) “Renaissance” and “renascence,” “resistance” and “reaction.” A poet such as Malory may achieve a (...) permanent place in literary history and on required-reading lists by resisting a shift in paradigm, whereas a scientist who resists will effectively disappear. Thus, the Morte Darthur set the terms for modern literature in English by holding fast to those of the Middle Ages. This essay argues that Malory was “modern” in that the Morte Darthur would not have been written except for the events in England and France of 1454–85 but that what was most modern about him was his resistance to concomitant changes in English society. (shrink)

In old age, I seldom keep the books I read, but The Books of Jacob has been shelved next to Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah; my copy of the latter bears an inscription on its flyleaf, “Gift of Jacob Taubes to Tantur, 1978,” which in some way (possibly mystical) authenticates bringing the two books together. It seems I have been waiting for the conjunction since first reading Gerhom Scholem on the Frankists, in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in the (...) carriage of a train waiting to depart from New Street Station, Birmingham, sometime in the mid-1980s. It was a moment of revelation; reading Tokarczuk has been too.A major literary achievement—no question: published in Polish in 2014, Tokarczuk's narrative meditation on the Frankists is a model of what may be done by integrating imagination with documentation. This is how what is loosely termed historical fiction should be written. Terrific when evoking the tastes and smells of Podolia or Smyrna, Tokarczuk is no less profound when expressing the aspirations and hesitations of a Jewish people trapped between two other religions, Islam and Christianity. Like Scholem before her, but in her own, entirely different manner, she brings to center stage movements of the mind that had previously been relegated to the wings. What was once regarded contemptuously as too “other”—other, that is, to post-Enlightenment descriptions of the world, past and present—has been shown by Scholem and now Tokarczuk to be crucial to an understanding of the modern world's genesis. What Scholem did for Sabbatai Sevi, Tokarczuk has done for Jacob Frank—and for his followers as well: those beyond-the-pale Jews who saw in him a savior who was no less anti-messianic than he was the messiah. (shrink)

: This paper shows how the ethical benefits of Mill's Religion of HumanityÑa life imbued with purpose, an improved regard for others, and greater happiness for oneself from the pleasures of fellow-feelingÑare to be actualized through the imagination's creation of compelling narratives about humanity. Understanding the ethical importance of the Religion of Humanity therefore implies understanding the central role of imagination in Millian ethical life. This investigation serves to articulate a feature of Mill's utilitarianism that differentiates it from Bentham's, namely (...) his commitment to the importance of a religious sensibility in the moral agent. It also raises the broader philosophical issue of what narratives a psychologically tenable humanist world-view requires. (shrink)