Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition provides the first detailed historical account of one of England's great jurists. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Neil Duxbury examines Pollock's career, jurisprudence, philosophy of the common law, treatise writing, and editorial initiatives, and shows that Pollock's contribution to the development of English law and juristic inquiry is both complex and crucial.Readership: Scholars and students of legal history and legal thought, barristers, and judges.

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts that have been the subject of much contention. For a start, how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in English by the Irish? It is a period in which ideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a (...) period which has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. Corcoran focuses his chapters on various themes such as "the Big House," and the rural and the provincial and offers discussions of authors ranging from Kinsella and Beckett to William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, to provide a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing. (shrink)

This book contains new critical editions of the Latin texts of Robert Grosseteste's 13th century treatise on free will, De libero arbitrio, with complete English translations. Included is a substantial study of the texts, their place in Grosseteste's body of works, doctrinal content, employment by later thinkers, and manuscript sources.

The rightness and wrongness of actions fits on a continuous scale. This fits the way we evaluate actions chosen among a diverse range of options, even though English speakers don’t use the words “righter” and “wronger”. I outline and defend a version of scalar consequentialism, according to which rightness is a matter of degree, determined by how good the consequences are. Linguistic resources are available to let us truly describe actions simply as right. Some deontological theories face problems in (...) accounting for degrees of rightness, as they don't invoke continuous parameters among the right-making features of action. (shrink)

In English, we use the word "I" to express thoughts that we have about ourselves, and we use the reflexive pronouns "himself" and "herself" to attribute such thoughts to others. Philosophers and linguists call such thoughts, and the statements we use to express them, de se. De se thoughts and statements, although they appear often in our day-to-day lives, pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume examines the structure of de se thought, (...) various issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of our discourse about it, and also what it reveals about how humans think about themselves and the world around them. (shrink)

Introduction -- Cultural theories of people -- Identities in standard English -- Language and social institutions -- The cultural self -- The self's identities -- Theories of identities and selves -- Theories of norms and institutions -- Social reality and human subjectivity.

In Elements of Legislation, Neil Duxbury examines the history of English law through the lens of legal philosophy in an effort to draw out the differences between judge-made and enacted law and to explain what courts do with the laws that legislatures enact. He presents a series of rigorously researched and carefully rehearsed arguments concerning the law-making functions of legislatures and courts, the concepts of legislative supremacy and judicial review, the nature of legislative intent and the core principles (...) of statutory interpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius' AchilleidNeil W. BernsteinP. J. Heslin. The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius' Achilleid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xx + 349 pp. Cloth, $80.You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe. Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle, don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold (...) the needle still and poke the thread at it—that's the way a woman most always does; but a man always does t'other way.... Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things just to make certain.(Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, chap. 11)In the wake of important briefer studies by Barchiesi, Feeney, and Hinds, and new editions by Rosati and Shackleton Bailey, Heslin has now produced the first full-length monograph in English on Statius' Achilleid. Although he surveys the entire poem, Heslin devotes particular attention to the episode of Achilles' transvestism at the court of Lycomedes on Scyros. By turns as witty, sophisticated, and learned as its object of examination, this book focuses on the themes of "the relationship of the Achilleid to the epic tradition and to the mythical biography of Achilles, Statius' manner of characterization, and the way he explores the nature of sex and gender" (xviii).Chapter 1, "Opening Nights at the Opera 1641–1744," demonstrates the Scyros narrative's appeal to a performance genre that commonly features transvestite masquerade. Assuming that his readers have little familiarity with the history of opera, Heslin surveys nine operas over a century and provides an "Epilogue" that brings his discussion into the twentieth century. The extended discussions of operas such as Gay's Achilles and Metastasio's Achille in Sciro (and the latter's numerous revivals) skillfully relate the libretti and staging to contemporary political, social, and literary debates. This chapter succeeds admirably in bringing out many of the major issues to which subsequent chapters return, such as the opposition of biologically essentializing and socially constructed models of gender and the conflict between heroic and burlesque approaches to mythological narrative.Chapter 2, "The Design of the Achilleid," takes up more traditional questions of form and genre. Though clearly an incomplete narrative, the Achilleid was carefully revised, and the text features a coherent design. Heslin suggests that Statius produced a prospectus designed to attract further patronage and thus intentionally left the reader unable to determine the future course of the epic either from the proem or extant narrative. Viewing the Achilleid as a prospectus permits Heslin to account for the proem's lack of specificity (in contrast, for example, to the "table of contents" found in the Thebaid's proem). The latter part of the chapter offers a close analysis of the proem and an assessment of Statius' engagement with the literary tradition. The Achilleid's proem bluffs the reader by advertising a linear, non-Aristotelian narrative, where in fact the epic begins in medias res and proceeds selectively. In contrast to the mad, vatic poet of the Thebaid, this narrator asserts his control over the narrative. Through passages such as Achilles' song in Chiron's cave, the epic enters "an ongoing discussion [End Page 142] regarding the proper version of a myth" (91) in the manner of learned Hellenistic poetry. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Statius' corrections of Vergil, such as his introduction of Deidamia (Achilleid 1.290–300) that responds to contemporary criticisms leveled at Vergil's Dido/Diana simile.Chapter 3, "Womanhood, Rhetoric, and Performance," offers a reading of the performances of gender by Thetis, Deidamia, and Achilles. Thetis' incompetent use of rhetoric makes her "the Mrs. Malaprop of Latin epic" (137). In her entreaty of Neptune, she fails to recapitulate the success enjoyed by literary models such her Homeric counterpart and the Vergilian Juno and Venus, in part because of her misuse of mythological exempla. She continues to misuse exempla in her persuasion of Achilles, undermining her case by associating his transvestism with the transsexuality of Caenis/Caeneus. Heslin further claims that Thetis engages in "discursive 'transvestism'" (133... (shrink)

Common-law judgments tend to be more than merely judgments, for judges often make pronouncements that they need not have made had they kept strictly to the task in hand. Why do they do this? The Intricacies of Dicta and Dissent examines two such types of pronouncement, obiter dicta and dissenting opinions, primarily as aspects of English case law. Neil Duxbury shows that both of these phenomena have complex histories, have been put to a variety of uses, and are (...) not amenable to being straightforwardly categorized as secondary sources of law. This innovative and unusual study casts new light on – and will prompt lawyers to pose fresh questions about – the common law tradition and the nature of judicial decision-making. (shrink)

David Hume’s legal theory has normally been interpreted as bearing close affinities to the English common law theory of jurisprudence. I argue that this is not accurate. For Hume, it is the nature and functioning of a country’s legal system, not the provenance of that system, that provides the foundation of its authority. He judges government by its ability to protect property in a reliable and equitable way. His positions on the role of equity in the law, on artificial (...) reason and the esoteric nature of the law, and on the role of judges in the legal system are all at odds with those of the common lawyers. (shrink)

In The Twentieth-Century Humanists from Spitzer to Frye, William Calin examines the contributions of eight scholar-critics who produced their most important work between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, before the advent of contemporary critical theory. Five are from Continental Europe. Leo Spitzer, Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach were German-language students of Romance literatures, while Albert Béguin and Jean Rousset, both speakers of French, were leading figures of the Geneva school. Calin also includes English-language scholars: the Oxford don C. (...) S. Lewis, the American F. O. Mathiessen, and the Canadian Northrop Frye. Calin's goal is threefold. He wants to draw distinctions between the mid-twentieth .. (shrink)

Previous studies show that reading sentences about actions leads to specific motor activity associated with actually performing those actions. We investigate how sign language input may modulate motor activation, using British Sign Language sentences, some of which explicitly encode direction of motion, versus written English, where motion is only implied. We find no evidence of action simulation in BSL comprehension, but we find effects of action simulation in comprehension of written English sentences by deaf native BSL signers. These (...) results provide constraints on the nature of mental simulations involved in comprehending action sentences referring to transfer events, suggesting that the richer contextual information provided by BSL sentences versus written or spoken English may reduce the need for action simulation in comprehension, at least when the event described does not map completely onto the signer's own body. (shrink)

This chapter shows how The Daily Show targets those political and religious leaders who claim to receive clear revelations from the divine, either by their own particular religious experiences and practices or through sacred texts. It considers some of the ways Stewart calls into question their apparently unquestionable grasp of the mind of God. Philosophers like the famous English thinker John Locke have made their living by carefully examining not only the nature of the world around us, but also (...) the more puzzling aspects of human behavior. For instance, Locke describes and critiques the sort of “enthusiasm” by recognizing that such religiously convicted individuals: “persuade themselves that they are under the peculiar guidance of heaven in their actions and opinions, especially in those of them which they cannot account for by the ordinary methods of knowledge and principles of reason. (shrink)

Variation in decision-making about end-of-life care among ethnic groups creates clinical conflicts. In order to understand changes in preferences for end-of-life care among Japanese who immigrate to the United States, we conducted 18 focus groups with 122 participants: 65 English-speaking Japanese Americans, 29 Japanese-speaking Japanese Americans and 28 Japanese living in Japan.Negative feelings toward living in adverse health states and receiving life-sustaining treatment in such states permeated all three groups. Fear of being meiwaku, a physical, psychological or financial caregiving (...) burden on loved ones, was a prominent concern. They preferred to die pokkuri (popping off) before they become end stage or physically frail. All groups preferred group-oriented decision-making with family. Although advance directives were generally accepted, Japanese participants saw written directives as intrusive whereas Japanese Americans viewed them mainly as tools to reduce conflict created by dying person's wishes and a family's kazoku no jo– responsibility to sustain the dying patient. These findings suggest that in the United States Japanese cultural values concerning end-of-life care and decision-making process are largely preserved. (shrink)

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the (...) earliest of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

In the present article, the work of contemporary English writer and screenwriter Neil Gaiman is studied from the point of view of artistic and philosophical reinterpretation of the principles of surrealism. His novels ‘Neverwhere‘, ‘Coraline‘ and the script for the film ‘Mirror mask‘are analysed, in which the interpenetration of the real and unreal world can be traced and the planes of reality and dreams are woven into one inseparable whole. It is emphasized that for the creative style of (...) Neil Gaiman game with space and time is typical: climbing the stairs out of the sewer, you can find yourself on a roof, away from home, you can go back to his door, looking through a window in the world of dream, you can see yourself sleeping. Therefore, the writer often uses the theme of dream, program for the philosophy of surrealism: the characters have dreams that are either echoes of the past or images of predicted future, reflection of dreams or the dream itself turns into a full-fledged reality that is being created by sleeping character. However, it can be noted that the approach of the writer to value of phantasmagoric worlds is changing. If in the novel ‘Neverwhere‘ the world of London below is conceptualized as an alternative to the real world, in the novel ‘Coraline‘, and especially in the movie ‘Mirror mask‘ filmed in 2005, staying in a different world helps heroes to understand the real world better and to seek that fills it with meaning. (shrink)

Neil Levy presents a new theory of freedom and responsibility. He defends a particular account of consciousness--the global workspace view--and argues that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. There are good reasons to think that the naïve assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true.

It is widely held that some kinds of deception into sex (e.g., lying about what pets one likes) do not undermine the moral force of consent while other kinds of deception do (e.g., impersonating the consenter’s partner). Tom Dougherty argues against this: whenever someone is deceived into sex by the concealment of a “deal breaker” fact, the normative situation is the same as there being no consent at all. Here it is argued that this conclusion is unwarranted. Dougherty’s negative arguments (...) against alternative theories of the deceptive undermining of consent are flawed, and his two positive arguments are unjustified. (shrink)

In this paper, we make the case that a person who is considering or has already made a decision that appears seriously harmful to that person should in some cases be judged incapable of making that...

The discovery that the universe is fine-tuned for life ? a discovery to which the phrase ?the anthropic principle? is often applied ? has prompted much extra-cosmic speculation by philosophers, theologians, and theoretical physicists. Such speculation is referred to as extra-cosmic because an inference is made to the existence either of one unobservable entity that is distinct from the cosmos and any of its parts (God) or of many such entities (multiple universes). In this article a case is mounted for (...) the sceptical position that cosmic fine-tuning does not support an inference to anything extra-cosmic. To that end three definitions of ?fine-tuned for life? are proposed: the ?slight difference? definition, the (unconditional) probability definition, and John Leslie?s conditional probability definition. These three definitions are the only ones suggested by the relevant literature on fine-tuning and the anthropic principle. Since on none of them do claims of fine-tuning warrant an inference to something extracosmic, it is concluded that there is no definition of ?fine-tuned for life? serving this function. (shrink)

If a person is competent to consent to a treatment, is that person necessarily competent to refuse the very same treatment? Risk relativists answer no to this question. If the refusal of a treatment is risky, we may demand a higher level of decision-making capacity to choose this option. The position is known as asymmetry. Risk relativity rests on the possibility of setting variable levels of competence by reference to variable levels of risk. In an excellent 2016 article inJournal of (...) Medical Ethics(JME), Rob Lawlor defends asymmetry of this kind by defending risk relativity, using and developing arguments and approaches found in earlier work such as that of Wilks. He offers what we call the two-scale approach: a scale of risk is to be used to set a standard of competence on a scale of decision-making difficulty. However, can this be done in any rational way? We argue it cannot, and in this sense, and to this extent, risk relativity is a nonsense. (shrink)

In this paper, I construct and defend an account of harm, specifically, all-things-considered overall harm. I start with a simple comparative account, on which an event harms a person provided that she would have been better off had it not occurred. The most significant problems for this account are overdetermination and preemption cases. However, a counterfactual comparative approach of some sort is needed to make sense of harm, or so I argue. I offer a counterfactual comparative theory that accounts nicely (...) for such cases, by taking claims about harm to be, potentially, irreducibly plural. In some cases, there are some events such that they are harmful, even if no one of them is such that it is harmful. I try to work out the details. (shrink)

In recent years there has been wide-ranging discussion of epistemic virtues. Given the value and importance of acquiring knowledge this discussion has tended to focus upon those traits that are relevant to the acquisition of knowledge. This acquisitionist focus ignores or downplays the importance of epistemic restraint: refraining from seeking knowledge. In contrast, in many periods of history, curiosity was viewed as a vice. By drawing upon critiques of curiositas in Middle Platonism and Early Christian philosophy, we gain useful insights (...) into the value and importance of epistemic restraint. The historical discussion paves the way for a clarification of epistemic restraint, one that distinguishes the morally relevant features of epistemic process, content, purpose, and context. Epistemic restraint is identified as an important virtue where our epistemic pursuits pose risks and burdens, where such pursuits have opportunity costs, where they are pursued for vicious purposes. But it is in the social realm where epistemic restraint has most purchase, epistemic restraint is important both because privacy is important and because being trusted are important. Finally, some suggestions are offered as to why epistemic restraint has not received the contemporary attention that it deserves. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the problem of omission for the counterfactual comparative account of harm. A given event harms a person, on this account, when it makes her worse off than she would have been if it had not occurred. The problem arises because cases in which one person merely fails to benefit another intuitively seem harmless. The account, however, seems to imply that when one person fails to benefit another, the first thereby harms the second, since the second (...) person would have been better off if the first had benefited her. I argue that the cases of failing to benefit at issue are in fact cases of harming. They are cases of preventive harm. I also argue that we can explain away the intuition that no harm occurs in these cases, and that the relevant implication of the counterfactual comparative account is consistent with a variety of plausible views about the moral significance of harm. (shrink)

Paul Strand defined twentieth-century American photography in a prolific career that spanned more than sixty years. His photographs explore the abstract and dynamic qualities found in the natural world, search for humanity in portraits of people and places, and document the experience of life itself. Highlighting the development of the photographer's aesthetic from his early encounters with Cubism to his humanistic depictions of people throughout the world, this book presents nearly forty years of Strand's wide-ranging and powerful work. In Focus: (...) Paul Strand is published to coincide with an exhibition of the photographer's work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles from May 10 through September 4, 2005. Commentaries on the pictures, along with an introduction and chronology of Strand's life, are provided by Anne Lyden, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. The book also includes an edited transcript of a colloquium on Strand's work that incorporates Lyden's contributions along with those of five other participants: David Featherstone, a freelance writer and editor; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; Naomi Rosenblum, independent scholar; Mark Ruwedel, photographer and professor of photography at California State University, Long Beach; and Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University. (shrink)

In many jurisdictions, adolescents acquire the right to consent to treatment; but in some cases their refusals – e.g. of life-saving treatment – may not be respected. This asymmetry of adolescent consent and refusal seems puzzling, even incoherent. The aim here is to offer an original explanation, and a justification, of this asymmetry. Rather than trying to explain the asymmetry in terms of a variable standard of competence – where the adolescent is competent to consent to, but not refuse, certain (...) interventions – the account offered here focuses more closely on the normative power to render actions permissible. Where normative powers are shared they can readily give rise to an asymmetry between consent and refusal. We then turn to why it is justifiable that normative powers be shared in adolescence. Transitional paternalism holds that the acquisition of normative powers by competent adolescents should not be an instant one, achieved in a single step, but that there should be a transitional period where paternalistic protection is rolled back, but not entirely withdrawn until a later date. Transitional paternalism could be implemented without generating the asymmetry between consent and refusal but, it is argued, the asymmetric version of transitional paternalism is to be preferred insofar as it offers a greater respect for the adolescent's decisions than the symmetrical alternative. (shrink)

This book offers a defense of the Property Theory of Content, according to which properties rather than propositions are the contents of our beliefs, desires, and other cognitive attitudes. New arguments for the theory are offered, objections are answered, and applications to problems in the philosophy of mind are discussed.

If we are to understand why psychoanalysis extends ordinary psychology in the precise ways that it does, we must take account of the existence of, and the interplay between, two distinct kinds of explanatory concern: functional and idiographic. The form and content of psychoanalytic explanation and its unusual methodology can, at least in part, be viewed as emerging out of Freud's attempt to reconcile these two types of explanatory concern. We must also acknowledge the role of the background theoretical context (...) that shapes Freud's functional thinking about the mind. A neglect of the role of the background theory in shaping the extension of ordinary psychology leaves us with puzzles about the nature and direction of the psychoanalytic extension and gives rise to an unbelievable history of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

If we are to understand why psychoanalysis extends ordinary psychology in the precise ways that it does, we must take account of the existence of, and the interplay between, two distinct kinds of explanatory concern: functional and idiographic. The form and content of psychoanalytic explanation and its unusual methodology can, at least in part, be viewed as emerging out of Freud's attempt to reconcile these two types of explanatory concern. We must also acknowledge the role of the background theoretical context (...) that shapes Freud's functional thinking about the mind. A neglect of the role of the background theory in shaping the extension of ordinary psychology leaves us with puzzles about the nature and direction of the psychoanalytic extension and gives rise to an unbelievable history of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This work is intended as an introduction to the study of Soviet psy chology. In it we have tried to present the main lines of Soviet psycho logical theory, in particular, the philosophical principles on which that theory is founded. There are surprisingly few books in English on Soviet psychology, or, indeed, in any Western European language. The works that exist usually take the form of symposia or are collections of articles translated from Soviet periodicals. The most important of (...) these are Psychology in the Soviet Union (ed. by Brian Simon), Recent Soviet Psychology (ed. by Neil O'Connor) and Soviet Psychology, A Symposium (ed. by Ralf Winn). Raymond Bauer has also edited an interesting symposium entitled Some Views on Soviet Psychology. Only two systematic studies of Soviet psychology have been published to date: Joseph Wortis' Soviet Psychiatry and Raymond Bauer's The New Man in Soviet Psychology. Both are valuable introductions to Soviet psychology; Bauer's book, in particular, gives a good account of the debates on psychological theory in the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties and -thirties. Both, however, are somewhat out of date. There are also a number of interesting articles written by Ivan D. London and Gregory Razran, which give general surveys of particular periods or aspects of Soviet psychology. These have been listed in the bibliography. (shrink)

Is genetic information of special ethical significance? Does it require special regulation? There is considerable contemporary debate about this question (the genetic exceptionalism debate). Genetic information is an ambiguous term and, as an aid to avoiding conflation in the genetic exceptionalism debate, a detailed account is given of just how and why genetic information is ambiguous. Whilst ambiguity is a ubiquitous problem of communication, it is suggested that genetic information is ambiguous in a particular way, one that gives rise to (...) the problem of significance creep (i.e., where claims about the significance of certain kinds of genetic information in one context influence our thinking about the significance of other kinds of genetic information in other contexts). A contextual and contrastive methodology is proposed: evaluating the significance of genetic information requires us to be sensitive to the polysemy of genetic information across contexts and then examine the contrast in significance (if any) of genetic, as opposed to nongenetic, information within contexts. This, in turn, suggests that a proper solution to the regulatory question requires us to pay more attention to how and why information, and its acquisition, possession and use, come to be of ethical significance. (shrink)

The naive anti-realist holds the following principle: (◊K) All truths are knowable. This unrestricted generalization (◊K), as is now well known, falls prey to Fitch’s Paradox (Fitch 1963: 38, Theorem 1). It can be used as the only suspect principle, alongside others that cannot be impugned, to prove quite generally, and constructively, that the set {p, ¬Kp} is inconsistent (Tennant 1997: 261). From this it would follow, intuitionistically, that any proposition that is never actually known to be true (by anyone, (...) at any time) is false; and it would follow, classically, that every truth is known (by someone, at some time). (shrink)

Philosophers, especially in recent years, have engaged in reflection upon the nature of experience. Such reflections have led them to draw a distinction between conscious and unconscious mentality in terms of whether or not it is like something to have a mental state. Reflection upon the history of psychology and upon contemporary cognitive science, however, identifies the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states to be primarily one which is drawn in epistemic terms. Consciousness is an epistemic notion marking the (...) special kind of first-person knowledge we have of our own mental states. Psychologists have found it expedient, for explanatory reasons, to ignore or reject the assumption that we have exhaustive first-person knowledge of our mental states and, in doing so, use the term ‘unconscious’ to indicate the peculiar epistemic status of certain mental states.It is argued that epistemic consciousness is distinct from the subjective-experiential notion of consciousness, from ‘access-consciousness’ and from higher-order thought conceptions of mental state consciousness, and that epistemic consciousness has an important role to play in philosophy of mind and in the history of psychology.Author Keywords: Consciousness; Unconscious mental states; Self-knowledge; History of psychology; Freud; Chomsky. (shrink)

This chapter casts into sharp relief Theodor W. Adorno's concept of history as a form of historical immanence of language. Here, as, to one degree or another throughout Adorno's corpus, the “untruth” of the “whole” can only be eluded through constant exertions to wrestle the latter into virtually every lexical predication. That Adorno's thinking at any given point in its development and formal presentation forms a coherent, exquisitely reflective, and mediated whole, supple and adaptive, is in no way contradicted by (...) this. However, the movement of thought through language is at the same time an inward, condensing movement of language within itself, a movement toward what is, for the logical organization of Adornean critical prose, a fusion of dialectics and style at the level of such language's smallest moving part: the sentence or short, aphoristic sequence of sentences. (shrink)

In the past decade, three philosophers in particular have recently explored the relation between desert and intrinsic value. Fred Feldman argues that consequentialism need not give much weight – or indeed any weight at all – to the happiness of persons who undeservedly experience pleasure. He defends the claim that the intrinsic value of a state of affairs is determined by the “fit” between the amount of well-being that a person receives and the amount of well-being that the person deserves. (...) Shelly Kagan uses a similar claim to motivate the view that equality is not intrinsically valuable. Thomas Hurka argues that desert is a third-order value, which is a function of the relation between the second-order value of having a virtuous or vicious character and the first-order value of experiencing pleasure or pain. In this paper, we sketch a theory of desert as fittingness and defend a general account of the relation between desert, well-being, and intrinsic value. We then discuss various applications of our “geometry of desert,” including a solution to the problem of the Repugnant Conclusion. In so doing, we explain, revise, and extend many of these authors’ central ideas. (shrink)