In this paper I respond to Robert Taylor's argument that a Rawlsian framework does not support strong affirmative action programs. The paper makes three main arguments. The first disputes Taylor's claim that strong AA would not be needed in ideal conditions. Private racial discrimination, I suggest, might still exist in such conditions, so strong AA might be needed there. The second challenges Taylor's claims that pure procedural justice constrains Rawlsian nonideal theory. I argue that this rests on a fetishizing of (...) pure procedural justice that is absent from Rawls's work. I also show that a revised formulation of Taylor's concern here also fails. My third argument makes a positive Rawlsian case for strong AA in nonideal conditions that builds on a Taylor concession. Taylor suggests that the goal of nonideal theory is to create a world in which ideal theory can be applied. My argument begins by showing that another permissible goal of Rawlsian nonideal theory is to ameliorate injustice. I then argue that Rawls's contractualist framework supports the strongest forms of AA when category 3 interventions are blocked. (shrink)

D. Barton Johnson traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the modernist (...) Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

Sanskrit text with commentaries on the theories of error in Mīmāṃsa school in Hindu philosophy by Maṇḍanamiśra, 7th century philosopher.

Taftāzānī, Masʻūd ibn ʻUmar, 1322-1389?; criticiam and intepretation; Islamic law; early works.

Open peer commentary on the article “Never Mind the Gap: Neurophenomenology, Radical Enactivism, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness” by Michael D. Kirchhoff & Daniel D. Hutto. Upshot: Enactivism is a welcome development in cognitive science, but its “radical” rejection of representation poses problems for capturing phenomenality. The totality of our interactions exceeds our awareness, so circumscribing the activity that constitutes consciousness seems to require representational guidance.

The question of providence and contingency in contemporary Western thought: a critical study from an Islamic perspective.

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, (...) Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine. (shrink)

During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

Liberty; Islamic philosophy; religious aspects; Islam.

Electronic communication and commerce facilitate the collection of information about individual use of the Internet. Focusing on the case of Comet Systems Inc. and its data gathering practices, this paper explores the technical details of gathering personal information in databases in general and the special character of the privacy issue raised by 'anonymous' information about individual behavior on the Internet. The case analysis suggests new insights for our understanding of privacy and frames a discussion of policy alternatives with respect to (...) the privacy of Internet communication. (shrink)

In the last decades of the XXth century we have witnessed a still growing interest in applied ethics, among them also bioethics, which in Slovak ethical literature was paid only a little attention as yet. The paper tries to examine the needs that led to the rise of bioethics, analyzing at the same time the concept of bioethics, its substance and subject. It deals also with its sources, putting stress on utilitarist and deontological ethics.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems and its Criticisms” by Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnold. Upshot: Autopoiesis based on meaning is a rich conceptual tool. It would be a pity to reduce it to a few general statements on self-reference in social systems.

Une étude sur la virtualité toujours présente du mal politique. Pour comprendre le présent de ce mal, il faut rouvrir le passé, remonter notamment au mal radical selon Kant, ou aux liens entre le tragique et la capacité d'institution politique chez Aristote. Se dégage alors une longue tradition : celle d'une humanité dénuée de toute prétention à l'innocence, rendue au mal de sa liberté.

This book looks at all the problems of 'God-talk' today and examines some of the answers which have been attempted. Do we talk of God as a 'who' or a 'what'? Is he up there or down here, in or around? What do we mean by saying that God is love? Why and how are certain qualities 'omni-business'? As he develops the outlines of an answer for an age which is haunted by questions, Mr Shaw shows that this issue is (...) more than an academic question; it is not least a demand made on ourselves. -Publisher. (shrink)

BackgroundDo sexual minority persons who have undergone unsuccessful sexual orientation change efforts suffer subsequent psychological or social harm from the attempt? Previous studies have conflated present and past, even pre-SOCE, harm in addressing this question. This study attempts, for the first time, to isolate and examine the question of current psychosocial harm for former SOCE participants among sexual minorities in representative population data.MethodUsing nationally representative data across three cohorts of sexual minorities in the United States, persons exposed to SOCE were (...) compared with the remainder not exposed to SOCE on two measures of internal distress—psychological distress and current mental health—and seven measures of behavioral harm: substance abuse ; alcohol dependence ; self-harm; suicide ideation; suicide planning; suicide intentions; and suicide attempts.ResultsThe SOCE group was statistically indistinguishable from the non-SOCE group on any measure of harm. For behavioral harm, risk ratios were 0.97–1.02. Harm was equivalent for the two groups despite the SOCE group having experienced higher lifetime and current minority stress, greater childhood adversity, and lower socioeconomic status. Logistic regression models that adjusted for these differences suggest that SOCE exposure reduced the effect of minority stress and childhood adversity for suicide attempts, although this effect did not fully account for the equivalence between the SOCE and non-SOCE groups.ConclusionDespite higher exposure to factors predicting behavioral harm—minority stress, childhood adversity, and lower socioeconomic background—sexual minority persons who had undergone failed SOCE therapy did not suffer higher psychological or social harm. Concerns to restrict or ban SOCE due to elevated harm are unfounded. Further study is needed to clarify the reasons for the absence of harm from SOCE. (shrink)