Democracy and justice are often mutually antagonistic ideas, but in this innovative book Ian Shapiro shows how and why they should be pursued together. Justice must be sought democratically if it is to garner legitimacy in the modern world, he claims, and democracy must be justice-promoting if it is to sustain allegiance over time. _Democratic Justice_ meets these criteria, offering an attractive vision of a practical path to a better future. Wherever power is exercised in human affairs, Shapiro argues, the (...) lack of democracy will be experienced as injustice. The challenge is to democratize social relations so as to diminish injustice, but to do this in ways that are compatible with people’s values and goals. Shapiro shows how this can be done in different phases of the human life cycle, from childhood through the adult worlds of work and domestic life, retirement, old age, and approaching death. He spells out the implications for pressing debates about authority over children, the law of marriage and divorce, population control, governing the firm, basic income guarantees, health insurance, retirement policies, and decisions made by and for the infirm elderly. This refreshing encounter between political philosophy and practical politics will interest all those who aspire to bequeath a more just world to our children than the one we have inherited. (shrink)

A growing number of authors defend putative examples of knowledge from falsehood (KFF), inferential knowledge based in a critical or essential way on false premises, and they argue that KFF has important implications for many areas of epistemology (whether evidence can be false, the Gettier debate, defeasibility theories of knowledge, etc.). I argue, however, that there is no KFF, because in any supposed example either the falsehood does not contribute to the knowledge or the subject lacks knowledge. In particular, I (...) show that if the subject actually has knowledge in putative KFF cases, then there is always a veridical evidential path meeting the basing conditions that accounts for her knowledge; if there is no such path, then the subject is in a type of Gettier case. All the recent arguments that rely on KFF are therefore based on a mistake. (shrink)

Stories in which a hero defeats a semi-human ogre occur much more frequently in unrelated cultures than chance alone can account for. This claim is supported by a discussion of folk-tales from 20 cultures and an examination of the folk-tales from a random sample of 44 cultures. The tendency to tell these stories must, therefore, have its source in the innate human nature discussed by evolutionary psychologists. This essay argues that these stories reinforce innate positive biases in the perception of (...) self and ingroup and negative biases in the perception of outgroups. (shrink)

He concludes with an assessment of democracy's strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.

Many epistemologists have recently defended views on which all evidence is true or perceptual reasons are facts. On such views a common account of basic perceptual reasons is that the fact that one sees that p is one’s reason for believing that p. I argue that that account is wrong; rather, in the basic case the fact that p itself is one’s reason for believing that p. I show that my proposal is better motivated, solves a fundamental objection that the (...) received view faces, and illuminates the nature of reasons for belief. (shrink)

I explain why Fernando Ferreira's interesting formal result does not threaten the bilateralist account of the sense of the connectives.

Within the limited, but growing, literature on small business ethics almost no attention has been paid to the issue of social responsibility within ethnic minority businesses. Using a social capital perspective, this paper reports on an exploratory and qualitative investigation into the attitudinal and behavioural manifestations of CSR within small and medium-sized Asian owned or managed firms in the U.K., with particular reference to the distinctive factors motivating organisational responses. It offers alternative explanations of entrepreneurial behaviour and suggests areas for (...) further research. (shrink)

This volume, co-published with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, presents the argument that a philosophy of technology is a central component of a contemporary political philosophy. It provides a theoretical groundwork for the encounter of phenomenology and critical theory. Written for courses in social and political theory, phenomenology and critical theory.

This paper reassesses the role of sceptical thinking in the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, in the context of the seminal but contestable History of Scepticism by Richard Popkin. It investigates the anti-sceptical essay by Galen De optimo modo docendi, which was retranslated in the sixteenth century by Erasmus and later published as an adjunct to the works of Sextus Empiricus, in order to highlight the currency of ideas about hyperbolic doubt, and links this to the (...) long tradition of free enquiry in which doubting authority is seen as a profitable exercise closely associated with the independence of philosophy from theological domination; and it argues that this long tradition played an important role in the emergence of the new science. (shrink)

The nature of basic equality (what it is that makes us all equals) can have implications not only for the question of the currency of egalitarian justice but also for that of its . The latter question is raised by G. A. Cohen in his critique of John Rawls's theory of justice. In this paper I argue that Rawlsian liberals might provide an answer to Cohen's critique by establishing two distinct kinds of basic equality, thus providing a of basic equality. (...) A first kind of basic equality gains moral relevance in the context of respectful relations between individuals, and establishes egalitarian duties between them. A second kind of basic equality gains moral relevance in the context of respectful relations between the state and individual citizens, and establishes egalitarian duties of the state toward citizens. The strength of Cohen's critique depends, in part, on the fact that Rawls identified only one kind of basic equality while at the same time wishing to defend a dualist account of individual and state duties. (shrink)

This article attempts to utilize the conceptual clarity typical of the work of Lucia Pizzo Russo to address the muddled question of the objectivity of perspective. By separating out the distinct problems of the objectivity of optical geometry, simple sight, and object recognition, we can clarify what we are not discussing when talking about linear perspective. These forms of objectivity are secured. But the claim is still made that linear perspective in pictorial perception is relative, because its results are not (...) consistent and often not relevant to making pictures. In its place, I nominate another objective method, the so-called Egyptian method, outlined by Rudolf Arnheim in his Art and Visual Perception. Therefore, my position is not purely relativist because the dismantling of linear perspective does not suggest that all is conventional. (shrink)

The image of philosophy -- The relational universe -- Generic science -- Thinking bodies.

This book investigates theories of interpretation and meaning in Renaissance jurisprudence.

Introduction THE FACES OF GOD How many faces has God? Egyptologists have wrestled with the problem over many years ...

The dissertation's primary task is to discern to what extent the investigations contained in Aristotle's Metaphysics conform to the model of science developed in the Posterior Analytics. It concludes that the Metaphysics substantially follows the model of the Analytics in studying the causes and attributes of a specific nature, although it makes significant departures especially in its conception of the principles of being and substance. ;Two introductory chapters discuss respectively Aristotle's conception of science in the Analytics and the problems one (...) is likely to face in attempting to apply this conception to the Metaphysics . Chapter 3 clarifies the meaning of the phrase "science of being qua being" by reference to the Posterior Analytics, and introduces the concept of pro&d13;v 3&d3;n equivocity. Chapter 4 considers the role of dialectic in metaphysics with particular reference to the principle of noncontradiction. Chapter 5 argues that the second part of Meta. 4.2 introduces a demonstrative science of the per se attributes of being and unity. ;Chapter 6 introduces the investigation into the principles and causes of being and reviews the aporias about the principles . Chapter 7 offers a hypothesis to explain Aristotle's identification of the science of being with first philosophy. The last two chapters argue that Aristotle is pursuing this investigation in the central books of Melaphysics, but his pursuit of the investigation there is incomplete. ;This interpretation provides an alternative to those of T. H. Irwin and Walter Leszl, who argue that metaphysics is a second-order discipline and not a science after the model of the Analytics. It finds explicit support in recent work by Robert Bolton and Alan Code, while widening the range of issues to include the attributes of being and the importance of first philosophy for understanding the nature of being. It supports many of the conclusions of Joseph Owens's, Urbain Dhondt's, and Frede and Patzig's work on the object of metaphysics. There are also substantial discussions of the contributions of G. E. L. Owen, J. G. Stevenson, Theodore Scaltsas, and John Thorp. (shrink)

If the history of the Gettier Problem has taught us anything, it is to be skeptical regarding purported solutions. Nevertheless, in “Manifest Failure: The Gettier Problem Solved” (2011), that is precisely what John Turri offers us. For nearly fifty years, epistemologists have been chasing a solution for the Gettier Problem but with little to no success. If Turri is right, if he has actually solved the Gettier Problem, then he has done something that is absolutely groundbreaking and really quite remarkable. (...) Regrettably, however, while Turri’s account is both intuitive and elegant—improving upon many seminal projects within contemporary epistemology—I argue in this paper that any success against Gettier counterexamples it affords is merely fleeting. Straightforwardly, this is done in two sections. In §1, I briefly sketch Turri’s proposed solution to the Gettier Problem. Then, in §2, I level a counterexample against it. Unfortunately for Turri and his solution, in this paper we will see history repeat itself. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has recently put forward a proof that every object exists necessarily. I show where the proof fails. My diagnosis also exposes the fallacy in A. N. Prior's argument in favour of his modal logic, Q.

From the 19th century to the present, philosophy has grappled with the domination of received form over ongoing experience and has proposed a return to the concrete in order to ally itself with social and intellectual liberation. My recent book, Groundwork of Phe-nomenological Marxism, identi????ies three historical phases of this task. The ????irst, associated with Karl Marx, takes political economy as its object and projects the liberation of labour. The second, asso-ciated with Edmund Husserl, takes mathematical physics as its ob-ject (...) and projects the liberation of philosophy and the human sci-ences from objectivism. The third takes ecology as its object and projects its central role in the rehabilitation of experienced nature from its objectivistic reduction to a resource—whose latest critical phase consists in the contemporary war between planetary tech-nology and place-based Indigeneity. Depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, la philosophie s’est battue contre la domination de la forme reçue sur l’expérience en cours et a proposé un retour au concret pour s’allier à la libération sociale et intellectuelle. Mon dernier livre, Les Fondements du marxisme phénoménologique, identi????ie trois phases historiques de cette tâche. La première, associée à Karl Marx, prend l’économie poli-tique pour objet et projette la libération du travail. La seconde, as-sociée à Edmund Husserl, prend pour objet la physique mathéma-tique et projette la libération de la philosophie et des sciences hu-maines de l’objectivisme. La troisième prend l’écologie comme objet et projette son rôle central dans la réhabilitation de la nature vécue depuis sa réduction objectiviste à une ressource – dont la dernière phase critique consiste en la guerre contemporaine entre la techno-logie planétaire et l’indigénéité territoriale. (shrink)

In response to Leroy Little Bear's description of the Blackfoot identity as rooted in place, the article articulates an ecological conception of value based in European thought that can be in close dialogue with the telling aboriginal phrase “I am the environment.” While important similarities are noted, especially the convergence of aboriginal and ecological conceptions of value on a critique of the assessment of value by commodity price, the difficulty of rooting value in Being within the European tradition contrasts with (...) the continuity of human, animal, and cosmic intelligence in aboriginal thought. (shrink)

An extended critique of the applicability of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche's thesis of the end of metaphysics to the philosophical practice of Socrates.

The present work develops the concept of instrumental reason in order to elaborate the implications of the connection of formalistic theory and technical action. Through a critique of this concept it establishes the limitations of instrumental reason and the necessity for a deeper conception o.

I suggest an alternative basis for Heyes’ analogy between cultural learning of mindreading and text reading. Unlike text reading, mindreading does not entail decoding of observable stimuli. Like text reading, mindreading requires relevant inferences. Identification of relevant inferences is a deeply challenging problem, and the most important contribution of cultural learning to mindreading may be an apprenticeship in thinking like a mindreader.

Gangestad & Simpson make a convincing case for male and female psychological access to sexual strategies that dispose us towards both faithful long-term mating and promiscuity – according to socio- ecological conditions. However, their model fails to acknowledge how the human self-system's mediation of conduct can permit us to override voluntarily the pseudo-imperatives of optimizing inclusive fitness.