The Harvard Graduate School of Education convocation speech, praised as "powerful" by Hillary Rodham Clinton in Teen Vogue and "inspired" by Justin Timberlake, that has offered inspiration to millions around the world In Lift Off, Donovan Livingston offers a groundbreaking rallying call about education, race, and the true nature of equality. In emotionally charged spoken-word poetry, Livingston shares a message of hope and hard truths, declaring that education can become an equalizer only if we first acknowledge the (...) inequality and racial divides holding back America's future. Livingston is dedicated to helping young people reach their celestial potential, and in his galvanizing commencement address, now adapted for the first time to the page, he calls on us to raise our voices on behalf of all children, as their brighter futures can light up our own. Together, we can lift off! Praise for Donovan Livingston "Donovan Livingston gave a powerful speech at the Harvard Graduate School of Education's convocation. In a spoken-word poem, he shared his struggles in life and urged his fellow graduates to fight inequality and inspire students. Donovan's message hit home. [He is] part of a rising generation that's. standing up to some of the biggest challenges in the world today."--Hillary Rodham Clinton, Teen Vogue "These are the words, and Donovan Livingston's voice and spirit are the music, but in any form, this rare graduation speech tells us that learning is full of bias yet can lead us to the stars."--Gloria Steinem "Donovan Livingston's Lift Offis our youth's gift to us. In this joyous young man's voice is the promise of tomorrow."--James McBride. (shrink)

Here Donald Livingston traces this distinction through all of Hume's writings and reveals its relevance for contemporary discussion.

Leading political theologian Oliver O'Donovan here takes a fresh look at some traditional moral arguments about war. Modern Christians differ widely on this issue. A few hold that absolute pacifism is the only viable Christian position, others subscribe in various ways to concepts of 'just war' developed out of a Western tradition that arose from the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas, while others still adopt more pragmatically realist postures. Professor O'Donovan re-examines questions of contemporary urgency including the use (...) of biological and nuclear weapons, military intervention, economic sanctions, war crimes trials and the roles of the Geneva Convention, international conventions and the UN. His enquiry opens with a challenging dedication to the new Archbishop of Canterbury and proceeds to shed new light on vital topics with which the Archbishop and others will be very directly engaged. It should be read by anyone concerned with the ethics of warfare. (shrink)

In aesthetics, the topic of intentions comes up most often in the perennial debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists over standards of interpretation. The underlying assumptions about the nature and functions of intentions are, however, rarely explicitly developed, even though divergent and at times tendentious premises are often relied upon in this controversy. Livingston provides a survey of contentions about the nature and status of intentions and intentionalist psychology more generally, arguing for an account that recognizes the multiple functions fulfilled (...) by intentions in the lives of temporally situated agents who deliberate over what to do, settle on ends and means, and try to realize some of their plans. Artists’ intentions are the same sorts of attitudes that we attribute to ourselves and to others as we attempt to describe, explain, and predict our actions. As such, intentions are relevant not only to debates over the interpretation of works of art but also to a range of other basic topics in the philosophy of art, including artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, the nature of texts, works, versions, and life-works, and the status and nature of fiction and fictional truth. With regard to the controversy over the interpretation of art, Livingston advocates a ‘partial’ intentionalism. Intentions are never infallible, so there is a conceptual gap between the completed work and the intentions that initiated and guided its making. Yet in spite of the fallibility of intentions and of our beliefs and claims about them, intentions regularly contribute to the determination of a work’s features, including implicit meanings, the recognition of which requires the uptake of the artist’s intentional design. Partial intentionalism also finds support in the idea that at least one sort of artistic value depends on the artist’s skilful accomplishment of intentions. (shrink)

In recent decades, Russell’s “Neutral Monism” has reemerged as a topic of great scholarly interest among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, and historians of early analytic philosophy. One of the most controversial points of scholarly dispute regarding Russell’s theory concerns how it best fits into standard classificatory schemes for understanding the relationship between mental phenomena and physical reality. The task of classifying Russell’s Neutral Monism is made all the more difficult by the fact that his conception of it evolves (...) in significant ways over the roughly four decades that he advocates it. In this paper, I contend that during this period, Russell holds (at least) three different, but related, ontological views, all of which he labels as “neutral monism”. This paper begins by considering key aspects of Russell’s early dualism which continue to play important roles in his Neutral Monism, especially his views about acquaintance, knowledge by description, structuralism about physics, and the construction of our physical knowledge. I argue that Russell revises, rather than abandons, his notion of knowledge by acquaintance in 1918 (when he gives up the act-object distinction) and contend that his resulting “neutral monism” remains a partial dualism until his 1921 The Analysis of Mind (hereafter AMi). Next, I explain how changes in physics leads Russell to re-conceptualize his Neutral Monism in The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy, while challenging the relatively widespread view that his new position is a nonstandard version of physicalism. Finally, I argue that after 1940, Russell’s mature Neutral Monism—as presented in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, My Philosophical Development, and elsewhere—is very plausibly interpreted as a version of “Russellian Physicalism”. (shrink)

Publication date: 15 October 2018 Source: Author: Donovan A. McFarlane This paper examines the constructs “Level of Educational Attainment” and “Intelligence Quotient” using a Case Study Approach based in current United States political conflicts and debates between U.S. Representative Maxine Waters and U.S. President Donald Trump. Specifically, the researcher examines U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, a democratic member of the U.S. Congress from the State of California, is a “low IQ individual”. The researcher examines (...) IQ indicators and focuses on the Level of Educational Attainment of Trump and Waters by accessing, analyzing, and interpreting the most current vital data on Level of Educational Attainment at the post-secondary level, specifically examining both parties’ LEA in relation to the population samples within their age groups. Additionally, the researcher briefly looks at the life circumstances of both Donald Trump and Maxine Waters to make an educated conclusion about both leaders’ levels of intelligence and IQs. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a number of recent Russell interpreters, including Evans, Davidson, Campbell, and Proops, mistakenly attribute to Russell what I call ‘the received view of acquaintance’: the view that acquaintance safeguards us from misidentifying the objects of our acquaintance. I contend that Russell’s discussions of phenomenal continua cases show that he does not accept the received view of acquaintance. I also show that the possibility of misidentifying the objects of acquaintance should be unsurprising given underappreciated aspects (...) of Russell’s overall theory of knowledge and acquaintance. Finally, I consider the radical impact that Russell’s actual views on acquaintance have for our understanding of his well-known George IV case in ‘On Denoting’. In particular, I argue that Russell’s treatment of the George IV case is not a one-size-fits-all solution to Frege’s Puzzle and provides no support for the received view of acquaintance. (shrink)

In this book, Livingston develops the political implications of formal results obtained over the course of the twentieth century in set theory, metalogic, and computational theory. He argues that the results achieved by thinkers such as Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and Cohen, even when they suggest inherent paradoxes and limitations to the structuring capacities of language or symbolic thought, have far-reaching implications for understanding the nature of political communities and their development and transformation. Alain Badiou's analysis of logical-mathematical structures (...) forms the backbone of his comprehensive and provocative theory of ontology, politics, and the possibilities of radical change. Through interpretive readings of Badiou's work as well as the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Livingston develops a formally based taxonomy of critical positions on the nature and structure of political communities. These readings, along with readings of Parmenides and Plato, show how the formal results can transfigure two interrelated and ancient problems of the One and the Many: the problem of the relationship of a Form or Idea to the many of its participants, and the problem of the relationship of a social whole to its many constituents. (shrink)

Research into how existentially aware nurses and nursing interventions have highlighted the benefits to patients and patient outcomes. Less is known about how existentially based training affects nurses themselves. This project sought to understand if and how a training programme developed to improve nurses' knowledge of existential theory would affect their well‐being. Overall, despite challenges to recruitment, follow‐up and data collection, three key themes were developed from the data: (1) Things Are Difficult, (2) We Need More… and (3) Well‐Being Is (...) Personal. Existentialist philosophy can be an effective way of providing nurses with the tools to develop and express their own definition of well‐being. It can also be useful to healthcare systems and administrators seeking to find ways of reducing burnout and turnover among nursing staff. (shrink)

The problem of explaining consciousness remains a problem about the meaning of language: the ordinary language of consciousness in which we define and express our sensations, thoughts, dreams and memories. This book argues that the problem arises from a quest that has taken shape over the twentieth century, and that the analysis of history provides new resources for understanding and resolving it. Paul Livingston traces the development of the characteristic practices of analytic philosophy to problems about the relationship of (...) experience to linguistic meaning, focusing on the theories of such philosophers as Carnap, Schlick, Neurath, Husserl, Ryle, Putnam, Fodor and Wittgenstein. Clearly written and avoiding technicalities, this book will be eagerly sought out by professionals and graduate students in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

In _Beyond Animal Rights_, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams introduced feminist "ethic of care" theory into philosophical discussions of the treatment of animals. In this new volume, seven essays from _Beyond Animal Rights_ are joined by nine new articles-most of which were written in response to that book-and a new introduction that situates feminist animal care theory within feminist theory and the larger debate over animal rights. Contributors critique theorists' reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they (...) suggest, have a masculine bias. They argue for ethical attentiveness and sympathy in our relationships with animals and propose a link between the continuing subjugation of women and the human domination of nature. Beginning with the earliest articulation of the idea in the mid-1980s and continuing to the theory's most recent revisions, this volume presents the most complete portrait of the evolution of the feminist-care tradition. (shrink)

Many currently working on a Russellian notion of perceptual acquaintance and its role in perceptual experience (including Campbell 2002a, 2002b, and 2009 and Tye 2009) treat naïve realism and indirect realism as an exhaustive disjunction of possible views. In this paper, I propose a form of direct realism according to which one is directly aware of external objects and their features without perceiving a mind-dependent intermediary and without making any inference. Nevertheless, it also maintains that the qualitative character of perceptual (...) experience is a feature of our internal states of sentient awareness and so is to be distinguished from the features of objects in the perceptual scene. On this proposal, we are pre-reflectively aware of the qualitative character of our sensations simply in virtue of having them, and we are non-inferentially aware of external objects and their features by being attuned to what the occurrence of our sensations tells us about the rest of the world. Consequently, we are presented with, and thus acquainted with, both the external objects and the qualitative character of our sensory experiences, albeit in very different ways. Drawing on resources from Perry (2001) and Searle (in draft), I explain how perceptual experience has this “two-faced presentational character”. (shrink)

Despite his rejection of the metaphysical conception of freedom of the will, Nietzsche frequently makes positive use of the language of freedom, autonomy, self-mastery, self-overcoming, and creativity when describing his normative project of enhancing humanity through the promotion of its highest types. A number of interpreters have been misled by such language to conclude that Nietzsche accepts some version of compatibilism, holding a theory of natural causality that excludes metaphysical or “libertarian” freedom of the will, while endorsing morally substantial alternative (...) conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and responsibility. I argue to the contrary that although Nietzsche’s rejection of... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

An examination and defence of the concept of personality, long central to Western moral culture but now increasingly under attack. Robert Spaemann tackles urgent practical questions, such as our treatment of the severely disabled human and the moral status of intelligent non-human animals.

Within contemporary analytic philosophy, varieties of “naturalism” have recently attained an almost unchallenged methodological and thematic dominance. As David Papineau wrote in the introduction to his 1993 book Philosophical Naturalism, “nearly everybody nowadays wants to be a naturalist,” although as Papineau also notes, those who aspire to the term also continue to disagree widely about what specific methods or doctrines it implies. My purpose in this paper, however, is not to argue for or against philosophical naturalism on any of the (...) several conceptions current among analytic philosophers, but rather simply to suggest that a closer look at the history of the analytic tradition can offer helpful terms for rethinking what can be meant by applying the categories of “nature” and “culture” within philosophy’s ongoing reflection on the constitutive forms of human life and practice. For, as I shall argue, the central experience of this history – philosophy’s radical encounter with what it envisions as the logical or conceptual structure of everyday language – also repeatedly demonstrates the existence of a fundamental aporia or paradox of origin and practice at the center of the claim of language upon an ordinary human life. The appearance of this paradox has repeatedly determined the results and projects of the analytic tradition, even as analytic philosophers have also reacted to it, on the level of positive theory, in characteristic modes of dismissal, denial, or repression. Besides offering to elicit more clearly what analytic philosophy still offers to show us about our everyday relation to the language that we speak, I shall argue, documenting the existence and effects of this aporia can also yield a clarified sense of the relationship of the analytic tradition itself to the neighboring streams of “continental” philosophy that have also taken up the question of language during the twentieth century. (shrink)

Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity appears to defend a distinctly existentialist, deontologically-constrained version of consequentialism. On that interpretation, her belief that freedom consists in the real possibilities provided by our concrete situation leads her to reject Kantian autonomy to allow for some consequentialist decisions, while her belief that our situation derives its meaning from freely-chosen projects leads her to limit such choices to their consequences for situated freedom rather than general happiness. However, I will argue that Beauvoir’s view is better understood (...) as a non-deontological, internal critique of consequentialism, rooted in Marx’s historical materialism rather than her existentialist commitments. Beauvoir challenges consequentialism’s tendency to evaluate decision-making over actions, and intended or predicted consequences over actual ones, considering consequences during a limited time-frame despite their variable, contingent future value. In other words, consequentialism is insufficiently consequentialist, a view rooted in historical materialism in two ways. First, her materialist understanding of freedom as situated possibility requires an ethics that prioritizes real rather than projected consequences. Materialist consequentialism acknowledges outcomes are never final and so refuses to assign unambiguous moral value. A decision’s ethical value is preserved only to the degree that the value of its real consequences for existing individuals’ projects is maintained into the indefinite future. Second, her view that value is historical, a human creation based in our actual situation’s contingent utility to our individually chosen projects, denies that any consequence has a fixed value independent of the historical development of humanity as realized through individual choices. Historical-materialist consequentialism demands moral agents retroactively reassess the moral status of every action in order to repair consequences that have, because of changing human purposes, become obstacles to freedom. Together, these historical materialist constraints ground Beauvoir’s demand for an ethics that is ambiguous in principle as well as practice: no decision, action, or consequence has a fixed moral value because consequences are always incomplete and, even when they do not change, the projects that give them value change. While compatible with existentialist conceptions of freedom, responsibility, and authenticity, her ethics does not require such commitments, making it more Marxist than existentialist in character. (shrink)

Paisley Livingston here addresses contemporary controversies over the role of "theory" within the humanistic disciplines. In the process, he suggests ways in which significant modern texts in the philosophy of science relate to the study of literature. Livingston first surveys prevalent views of theory, and then proposes an alternative: theory, an indispensable element in the study of literature, should be understood as a Cogently argued and informed in its judgments, this book points the way to a fuller understanding (...) of the special contribution that literary knowledge may make within the human sciences. (shrink)

This paper sets forth Bolzano’s little-known 1843 account of beauty. Bolzano accepted the thesis that beauty is what rewards contemplation with pleasure. The originality of his proposal lies in his claim that the source of this pleasure is a special kind of cognitive process, namely, the formation of an adequate concept of the object’s attributes through the successful exercise of the observer’s proficiency at obscure and confused cognition. To appreciate this proposal we must understand how Bolzano explicated a number of (...) concepts in his Wissenschaftslehre. I argue that Bolzano was ahead of his time and anticipated some of the results of recent empirical psychological research on the relations between beauty, affect, and processing fluency. Bolzano’s remarks on ugliness and on relations between pure and mixed beauty are also of contemporary interest. The upshot is that Bolzano’s account of beauty is neither as derivative nor ‘dark’ as some of his commentators have claimed. (shrink)

Neutral monism is the view that both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are grounded in a more fundamental form of reality that is intrinsically neither mental nor material. It has often been treated as an odd fringe theory deserving of at most a footnote in the broader philosophical debates. Yet such attitudes do a grave disservice to its sophistications and significance for late nineteenth and early twentieth-century philosophy of mind and psychology. This paper sheds light on this neglected view by situating it (...) within broader historical monist debates about the mind and bringing attention to one of its central internal disputes regarding ‘mental chemistry’. By taking a closer look at how Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell address the question of whether and how our mental episodes are composed of more basic elements, it highlights deep differences among their conceptions of the fundamental ‘neutral stuff’ and its relations to ‘mind’ and ‘matter’. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, presents new biographical details about how and why Russell wrote it, and highlights its continued significance for contemporary philosophy. It also surveys Russell’s famous distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract objects.

Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic (awarded the 2016 Bertrand Russell Society Book Prize) brings together ten new essays on Bertrand Russell's best-known work, The Problems of Philosophy. These essays, by some of the foremost scholars of his life and works, reexamine Russell's famous distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract objects. In addition, this volume includes an editors' introduction, (...) which summarizes Russell's influential book, presents new biographical details about how and why Russell wrote it, and highlights its continued significance for contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Prof. Tom Donovan suggests reading Freud today for aid in thinking about the human condition and inspiration to seize one's life. Philosophy can connect us to ourselves, our world, and our best traditions while training us in excellence and usefulness, blocking out some of the ridiculous things littering the contemporary world.

Paisley Livingston asks questions about the arguments Philosopher George M. Wilson offers in order to establish that the Mediated Version of his Imagined Seeing Thesis is superior to other options.

This paper argues that we can better distinguish and evaluate right and left forms of contemporary populism with the help of two Nietzschean claims: first, that “slave morality” is a distinctly non-political form of revolt and, second, that it is not the work of “slaves” or the “masses”—it is initiated by a “priestly” subclass of the ruling class rather than by the underclass, which it manipulates in its own interest. I first suggest that contemporary right-wing populism is mistakenly interpeted as (...) a division of the right against against the left, modernity, and progressivism, when it is better understood as a division within the modern economic right, a reaction against the rise of the neoliberal, technocratic form of capitalism that materially disrupts and culturally devalues earlier conservative forms of identity and social life that were compatible with capitalism’s earlier industrial form. Novel conditions of capitalism’s growth and development produce a new cultural hierarchy and morality that valorizes international over national identity and interests; urban over rural life; technological, scientific, and secular worldviews over cultural and religious ones; and identities defined by education and profession over family and community. Neoliberalism’s material disruption of the conditions of old conservative forms of social life, identity, and self-worth produces a deep sense of social inferiority among conservatives of all classes, leading to a moral revolt in which the old economic masters harness the resentment of the underclass to avenge themselves against the moral hierarchy of new economic masters who are quickly overpowering them, leaving them with a lesser, “priestly” rather than “knightly” form of aristocratic superiority over the populace—that is, national and regional, cultural and religious power rather than the international economic and political superiority wielded by the “knightly” neoliberal class. Right-populism is, consequently, a false populism, a master morality in the guise of a slave revolt that is directed, funded by, and ultimately serves the moral interests of a conservative priestly subset of the ruling class. Unable to regain material superiority, the priestly class seeks to regain its social capital over the knightly class by channeling the populace’s resentment away from the destructive consequences of capitalism (the shared politics of both factions), toward marginalized segments of the underclass and toward the socially-liberal morality of neoliberalism—a morality that is anti-conservative only to the degree compatible with capitalism, defending the marginalized only within the interests of the growth and protection of its economic power. This accounts for its paradoxical character as a slavish-master morality, blending privilege and resentment, the material status of master with the evaluative mode and social status of slave. (Consider, for example, that many Trump supporters not only were not working class but wealthy, and that a surprising percentage were neither white nor male.) At the same time, right-populism is also a false politics, aiming not primarily at political but cultural power, targeting not neoliberal policy but only its cultural ideology insofar as it is independent of the demands of capitalism. Indeed, by falsely divorcing the social liberalism of neoliberal morality from its conservative, capitalist politics, right-populism indirectly promotes the knightly-neoliberal class’s politics of privatization, deregulation, and austerity, furthering the decline of conservative forms of social life and further aggravating the conservative resentment it claims to remedy. Moreover, right-populism directly diminishes the success of left populism, of a truly populist, truly political resistance to neoliberalism, not only indirectly enabling the neoliberal class’s dismantling of social democracy and the welfare state, but also directly demonizing the left, conflating its anti-neoliberal politics with neoliberal morality and drawing the left’s energies away from political resistance toward culture wars that turn the left, and the general populace, against itself rather than against the ruling class, obscuring broader lines of discontent with, and potential political alignment against, neoliberalism. I conclude that it is the under-appreciated historical-materialist character of Nietzsche’s analysis of slave morality that offers particular insight into our present predicament. On one hand, he rightly stresses that slave revolt is not about material power alone but also about social recognition, a resentment over social status that infects the privileged as well as the marginalized. On the other hand, he insists that such reactionary social movements are effective only because their deeper cause is the real political power of a ruling class—reminding us that they are only effectively defeated through material rather than moral resistance, and through a politics that targets the ruling classes rather than the people they manipulate. Consequently, we should also suspect that anti-populism is not an effective or progressive politics but, like right-populism, merely a moral reaction to moral reaction, a slavish-master morality ultimately in the service of, and doomed to foster, the very conservative politics it pretends to oppose. (shrink)

Book review of The Philosophy of Art. By STEPHEN DAVIES.. Blackwell. 2006.

The current Ebola epidemic has presented challenges both medical and ethical. Although we have known epidemics of untreatable diseases in the past, this particular one may be unique in the intensity and rapidity of its spread, as well as ethical challenges that it has created, exacerbated by its geographic location. We will look at the infectious agent and the epidemic it is causing, in order to understand the ethical problems that have arisen.

Oliver O'Donovan's Ethics as Theology project began withSelf, World, and Time, an "induction" into Christian ethics as ordered reflection on moral thinking within the life of faith. Volume 2, Finding and Seeking, shifted the focus to the movement of moral thought from a first consciousness of agency to the time that determines the moment of decision. In this third and final volume of his magnum opus, O'Donovan turns his attention to the forward horizon with which moral thinking must (...) engage. Moral experience, he argues, is necessarily two-directional, looking both back at responsibility and forward at aims. The Pauline triad of theological virtues (faith, love, and hope) describes a form of responsibility, and its climax in the sovereignty of love opens the way to a definitive teleology. Entering into Restoffers O'Donovan's mature reflections on questions that have engaged him throughout his career and provides a synoptic view of many of his main themes.". (shrink)

PATRICK O'DONOVAN AND LAURA RASCAROLI Introduction: Cosmopolitanism between Spaces and Practices Cosmopolitan Spaces You are standing in the Pantheon in ...

Kit Fine’s arguments in Essence and Modality are widely accepted as being a decisive blow against modal essentialism. A selection of replies exist that have done little to counter the general view that modally construed essence is out of touch with what we really mean when we make essentialist claims. I argue that Fine’s arguments fail to strike a decisive blow, and I suggest a new interpretation of the debate that shows why Fine’s arguments fall short of achieving their goal.

Lisa Sideris's Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (2017) proposes that the call by some science advocates for a new moral framework based on scientific wonder is flawed. Sideris develops a typology of “wonder” with two separate affective axes: “true wonder” that is the prerogative of a sort of dwelling with the overwhelming mystery of life, and “curiosity” that presses to resolve puzzles and break through into a space of total clarity. The former, Sideris writes, is an ethical (...) resource that, by placing the human self against the backdrop of the unknowable cosmic expanse, prompts humility and genuine admiration for nature. The latter is the theater of “mere science.” This essay follows suit with Sideris's line of questioning, but also pushes back on the correlation of wonder with ethical attentiveness and proposes ways that science in its puzzle‐solving mode can be brought back into the ethical conversation. (shrink)

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Evolution.

Traditional conventionalism about modality claims that a proposition is necessarily true iff it is true by convention. In the wake of the widespread repudiation of truth-byconvention, traditional conventionalism has fallen out of favour. However, a family of theories of modality have arisen that, whilst abandoning truth-by-convention, retain the spirit of traditional conventionalism. These ‘neo-conventionalist’ theories surpass their forebears and don’t fall victim to the criticisms inherited through truth-by-convention. However, not all criticisms levelled at traditional conventionalism target truth-by-convention. Any conventional theory (...) of modality must face the contingency problem. This claims that the contingency of our linguistic conventions jeopardises the necessity of the necessities they determine. I present the contingency problem as relevant to both the traditional conventionalist and the neo-conventionalist. I examine a response from Einheuser that builds upon a response from Wright. I show that the Einheuser response does more to accommodate the conventionalist’s modal beliefs, but that it does not fully satisfy some further conditions that ought to be laid upon such a response. I then suggest how the response can be revised so as to satisfy these conditions. The resulting model of conventionalism is compatible with the validity of S4, and suitably in the spirit of conventionalism. (shrink)