Like elsewhere in Nigeria and Africa, the imposition of colonial rule on Batombuland and the incursion of western ideas produced profound socio-cultural, economic and political changes in the Batombu society. However, unlike several Nigerian and African peoples whose histories have received extensive scholarly attention, the history of the Batombu has attracted very little scholarly attention. Thus virtually neglected, the Batombu occupies a mere footnote position in the extant historiography of Nigeria. This is the gap this article seeks to fill. It (...) examines the impact of colonialism and western civilisation on Batombu’s political, social, economic and cultural institutions and concludes that as profound and far-reaching as these changes were some important aspects of the indigenous institutions and traditional practices of the people survived. (shrink)

_The assessment of institutional quality and its influence on economic performance is highly relevant in Nigeria due to the country's constantly changing governmental institutions, dynamic market circumstances, and diversified socioeconomic atmosphere. Thus, the study aims to investigate the impact of institutional quality on the economic performance of Nigeria. This study employed ex post facto research, while time series data was used, which spans from 1996 to 2021, sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). (...) The study employed unit root tests, Johansen cointegration, and the Error Correction Model as estimation techniques. However, post estimation tests such as normality, serial correlation, heteroskedasticity and stability tests were carried to ascertain the level of statistical accuracy outcome of the variables used. The findings suggest that there is a sustained nexus between the quality of institutions and characteristics related to economic growth. Also, it was equally found out that political stability has a significant impact in the short run. This suggests that a unit increase in political instability would definitely amount to a decrease in economic performance in Nigeria during the period under investigation. The study suggests enhancing accountability, transparency, administrative efficiency, and law adherence to improve Nigerian institutions. This can be achieved through reform implementation, capacity building, and good governance mechanisms, while reducing political unrest and fostering stability._. (shrink)

_The study investigates the relationship between healthcare spending and economic growth in six selected Sub-Saharan African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cameroon, and Ethiopia. The study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model as an estimation technique to analyse the panel data which spans from 2000 to 2020. The research examines both the short- and long-run impacts of healthcare spending, population growth, and life expectancy on real GDP (a proxy for economic growth). Based on the ARDL panel results, it is (...) stated that, in the short run, both healthcare spending and life expectancy exert a significant negative impact on real GDP. However, in the long run, real GDP is positively and significantly influenced by all the regressors, highlighting the crucial role of healthcare investment in driving economic development. Additionally, the Granger causality test reveals a bidirectional relationship between real GDP and per capita health spending, suggesting that enhancements in healthcare can stimulate economic growth, and economic growth, in turn, can lead to increased healthcare investments. The study strongly recommends that policymakers in these countries adhere to the Abuja Declaration by allocating 15% of their national budgets to the healthcare sector to bolster economic outcomes. These findings emphasize the critical importance of sustained healthcare investment as a catalyst for long-term economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa._. (shrink)

Theists typically think the freedom to choose between right and wrong is a great good . Yet, they also typically think that the very best being—God—and inhabitants of the very best place—heaven—lack this kind of freedom. The question arises: if freedom to choose evil is so good, then why is it absent from the best being and the best place? I discuss articulations of this question in the literature and point out drawbacks of answers that have been proposed. I then (...) propose a new answer by showing how freedom to do evil could result in certain good situations even if it does not contribute to the intrinsic greatness of a certain being or place. (shrink)

This paper provides a sound and complete proof system for a language that adds to Dynamic Epistemic Logic a discrete previous-time operator as well as single symbol formulas that partially reveal the most recent event that occurred. The completeness theorem is by filtration followed by model unraveling and other model transformations. Decidability follows from the completeness proof. The degree to which it is important to include the additional single symbol formulas is addressed in a discussion about the difficulties of the (...) completeness for a language that only adds the previous-time operator to DEL. Discussion is also given regarding the completeness for a language obtained by removing common knowledge operators from. (shrink)

This book argues that this powerful technique permits the social sciences to meet an explanation, in which one 'grows' the phenomenon of interest in an artificial society of interacting agents: heterogeneous, boundedly rational actors.

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they (...) developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support. (shrink)

We are living in an age that is narratively obsessed: both in the academy and in popular culture, temporally articulated phenomena currently exert a vice-like grip over the collective imagination. Under such conditions, how may non-narrative sources of aesthetic power be made available once again to human observers? Charlie Kaufman’s response, in Adaptation, takes the form not of statements but of actions, of “philosophical therapy” for our insatiable narrative hunger. It leaves us, in the end, with two phenomena that have (...) (in the full sense of the word) no history at all: the beauty of flowers and the intricacy of a human soul. (shrink)

The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...) analysis of biological teleology has the unique advantage that the selected effect function of a trait is also a causal explanation of the trait: the trait exists because it performs this function. We show, however, that selected effect functions as currently defined explain the existence of traits only under highly restrictive assumptions about evolutionary dynamics. In many common scenarios in which traits evolve by natural selection, selected effect functions do not explain those traits. This is because definitions of selected effect function extract from any evolutionary scenario only the information that would be explanatorily relevant in the simple evolutionary scenario implicit in those definitions. When applied to more complex scenarios selected effect functions omit the key information that is explanatorily relevant in those scenarios. The assumptions required for selected effect functions to be explanatory are particularly unlikely to hold in the domain that its proponents care most about - the evolution of representation. A more adequate selected effects theory of Proper functions may be possible, but will require much greater attention to the structure of actual evolutionary explanations. (shrink)

Research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments shows a striking pattern. Often, there are powerful intuitions on one side and also powerful intuitions on the exact opposite side. A question now arises about how to understand this pattern. One possible view would be that it is primarily a matter of different people having different intuitions. I present evidence for the view that this is not the correct understanding. Instead, I suggest, it is primarily a matter of individual people having *conflicting (...) intuitions*. That is, it is primarily a matter of individual people having an intuition on one side and also having an intuition on the opposite side. (shrink)

This article aims to provide an a posteriori argument from love for the Trinity. A reformulation of the argument from love is made by proposing a novel version of the argument that is situated within an objective, empirical, natural theological framework. Reformulating the argument in this specific manner will enable it to ward of an important objection that is often raised against it, and ultimately render this argument of great use in establishing the necessity of the Trinity.

ABSTRACT:This article considers the economic case for so-called sweatshop wages and working conditions. My goal is not to defend or reject the economic case for sweatshops. Instead, proceeding from a broadly pluralist understanding of value, I make and defend a number of claims concerning the ethical relevance of economic analysis for values that different agents utilize to evaluate sweatshops. My arguments give special attention to a series of recent articles by Benjamin Powell and Matt Zwolinski, which represent the latest and (...) best defense of the economic case for sweatshops. In the process, I challenge Zwolinski’s “non-worseness claim”, and the idea that opposition to sweatshop wages and working conditions fails to respect that the autonomy of would-be sweatshop workers. Ultimately, I conclude that even if the economic case for sweatshops rests on a solid empirical foundation, agents possess good reason to advocate for better wages and working conditions for sweatshop workers, and to prefer less exploitative or coercive relationships. Sweatshop labor undermines a compelling vision of free markets, according to both Kantian and republican conceptions of freedom, and the relationships formed by those who participate in such markets. (shrink)

In virtue of what are we justified in employing the rule of inference Modus Ponens? One tempting approach to answering this question is to claim that we are justified in employing Modus Ponens purely in virtue of facts concerning meaning or concept-possession. In this paper, we argue that such meaning-based accounts cannot be accepted as the fundamental account of our justification.

This article aims to provide an explication of the Christian doctrine of eternal generation. A model of the doctrine is formulated within the ground-theoretic framework of Jonathan Schaffer and E. Jonathan Lowe, which enables it to be explicated clearly and consistently, and two often raised objections against the doctrine can be successfully answered.

This paper provides a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s former teacher at École Normale Supérieure, then famous for fashioning Marxism with the philosophical gauge of structuralism, Louis Althusser. Perhaps a brief discussion on the relation between the two would render context to the origins of Rancière's philosophico-political praxis, specifically the humble beginnings of conceptualizing an egalitarian method out of his philosophical rupture with Althusserianism. Meanwhile, to reduce the philosophical enterprise of Althusser into its practical shortcomings and silence during the revolutionary events (...) of May 1968 in France would do an injustice to the magnitude of his contribution to contemporary French political theory and his major revisions in the theoretical direction of the Parti communiste français. Thus, the following discussions focus on sketching Althusser's theoretical foundations, which possibly clarifies the political decision he has made during May '68: a demand for organization over spontaneous revolutionary activity based on the authority of theoretical practice over the ideological activities—a decision that became the point of departure for Rancière's subversion of both mastery and the structural inequality Althusserianism entail. The whole piece is guided by the following two-fold question—a question, perhaps, akin to Badiou's inquiry: What were the philosophico-political interventions of Louis Althusser, and why did Rancière move away from his direction? (shrink)

"The influence of materialist ontology largely dominates philosophical and scientific discussions. However, there is a resurgent interest in alternative ontologies from panpsychism to idealism and dualism. The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism is an outstanding reference source and the first major collection of its kind. Historically grounded and constructively motivated, it covers the key topics in philosophy, science, and theology, providing students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to idealism and immaterialism. Also addressed is post-materialism developments, with explicit attention (...) to variations of idealism and immaterialism. Comprising forty-four chapters written by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors, the Handbook is organised into five clear parts: Idealism and the History of Philosophy Important Figures in Idealism Systematic Assessment of Idealism and Science Idealism, Physicalism, Panpsychism, and Substance Dualism. Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind, The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism will also be of interest to those in related discplines where idealist and immaterialist ontology impinge on history, science, and theology"--. (shrink)

This book brings together an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.

Responding to criticism by Gordon Sollars and Frank Englander, this paper highlights a significant tension in recent debates over the ethics of global supply chains. This tension concerns the appropriate focus and normative frame for these debates. My first goal is to make sense of what at first reading seems to be a very odd set of claims: that valuing free, autonomous, and respectful markets entails a “fetish for philosophical purity” that is inconsistent with a moral theory that finds no (...) wrong in harming workers, including the least advantaged among them. Sollars and Englander reach these conclusions, I believe, because their criticism assumes and relies upon the presumption of a global prioritarian frame, one which focuses individual welfare, and which they then apply at the level of individual political and economic actors. Much of Benjamin Powell and Matt Zwolinski’s work, I continue, including their criticism of political and economic activism and Powell’s indictment of organized labor, relies on a similar frame—while expanding the harms to include the freedom and autonomy of would-be sweatshop workers. This prioritarian frame, I argue, is particularly poorly suited to discussion of the ethical responsibilities of individual economic and political actors. We ought to reject it. To make progress on debates over global sweatshops, and the ethics of global supply chains in general, we need a better frame, and better standards of freedom and autonomy, than those invoked by many prominent defenders of sweatshops. (shrink)

Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape centers on ambiance as it affects the expanded sculptural field, particularly filling a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on sculptures and installations in the Africana world and elsewhere. This book differentiates ambiance from other affective states and emotions and explores its production. It provides an introduction to the history of ambiance and vividly demonstrates, through immersive and experiential writing, how ambiance manifests in different artistic situations and social settings. The book considers (...) the neglected and unique importance of sculptural ambiance to the history of Africana visual culture, and what these works mean in terms of their social, historical, cultural, political, and ecological imagination of space. The book is written in an episodic style and begins with a description of an image before present an analysis of the artist's style and staging for ambient experience. This book will benefit college and university students; scholars of art, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and sociology; and curators and galleries. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of (...) political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age. (shrink)

At the time of Heinrich Hertz's premature death in 1894, he was regarded as one of the leading scientists of his generation. However, the posthumous publication of his treatise in the foundations of physics, "Principles of Mechanics", presents a curious historical situation. Although Hertz's book was widely praised and admired, it was also met with a general sense of dissatisfaction. Almost all of Hertz's contemporaries criticized "Principles" for the lack of any plausible way to construct a mechanism from the hidden (...) masses that are particularly characteristic of Hertz's framework. This issue seemed especially glaring given the expectation that Hertz's work might lead to a model of the underlying workings of the ether. In this paper I seek an explanation for why Hertz seemed so unperturbed by the difficulties of constructing such a mechanism. In arriving at this explanation, I explore how the development of Hertz's image-theory of representation framed the project of "Principles". The image-theory brings with it an austere view of the essential content of mechanics, only requiring a kind of structural isomorphism between symbolic representations and target phenomena. I argue that bringing this into view makes clear why Hertz felt no need to work out the kinds of mechanisms that many of his readers looked for. Furthermore, I argue that a crucial role of Hertz's hypothesis of hidden masses has been widely overlooked. Far from acting as a proposal for the underlying structure of the ether, I show that Hertz's hypothesis ruled out knowledge of such underlying structure. (shrink)

In our society, some aspects of life are off-limits to commerce. We prohibit the selling of children and the buying of wives, juries, and kidneys. Tainted blood is an inevitable consequence of paying blood donors; even sophisticated laboratory tests cannot supplant the gift-giving relationship as a safeguard of the purity of blood. Like blood, health care is too precious, intimate, and corruptible to entrust to the market.The hospice movement in the United States is approximately 40 years old. During these past (...) four decades, the concept of holistic, multidisciplinary care for patients who are suffering from a terminal illness has evolved from a modest, grassroots constellation of primarily volunteer-run and community-governed endeavors to a multimillion dollar industry where the surviving nonprofits compete with for-profit providers, often publicly traded, managed by M.B.A.-trained executives, and governed by corporate boards. The relatively recent emergence of for-profit hospice reflects an increasing commercialization of health care in the United States, the potentially adverse impact of which has been well documented. (shrink)

Existential gratitude-gratitude for one's very existence or life as a whole-is pervasive across the most influential human, cultural and religious traditions. Weaving together analytic and continental, as well as non-western and historical philosophical perspectives, this volume explores the nexus of gratitude, existence and God as an inter-subjective phenomenon for the first time. A team of leading scholars introduce existential gratitude as a perennially and characteristically human phenomenon, central to the distinctive life of our species. Attention is given to the conditions (...) under which existence itself might be construed as having a gift-like or otherwise gratitude-inducing character. Drawing on a diversity of perspectives, chapters mark out new territory in philosophical inquiry, addressing whether and in what sense we ought to be grateful for our very existence. By analysing gratitude, this collection makes a novel contribution to the discourse on moral emotions, phenomenology, anti-natalism and theology. (shrink)

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life (...) does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life. (shrink)

There is a growing commitment by different parts of the alternative food movement (AFM) to improve labor conditions for conventional food chain workers, and to develop economically fair alternatives, albeit under a range of conditions that structure mobilization. This has direct implications for the process of intra-movement building and therefore the degree to which the movement ameliorates economic inequality at the point of food labor. This article asks what accounts for the variation in AFM labor commitments across different contexts. It (...) then appraises a range of activist perspectives, practices, and organizational approaches. The answer emerges through a comparative analysis of three California social movement organizations enmeshed in the particularities of local contentious food politics. The cases include a labor union representing grocery store and meatpacking/food processing workers, a food justice organization working to create green jobs and independent funding models, and an organic urban farming and educational organization. Commitment to fair labor standards varies due to differences in organizational capacity, the degree of dedication to ending economic inequality in local activist culture, and the openness of local political and economic institutions to working class struggles. The article concludes with a discussion of how these findings inform our understanding of the process of cooperation and division in the AFM, particularly regarding the complexities and contradictions of using food labor to combat economic inequality. Movement building in the midst of varying institutional, organizational, and cultural contexts reinforces the value of a reflexive approach to this imperfect politics of process. (shrink)

This paper adds temporal logic to public announcement logic (PAL) and dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). By adding a previous-time operator to PAL, we express in the language statements concerning the muddy children puzzle and sum and product. We also express a true statement that an agent’s beliefs about another agent’s knowledge flipped twice, and use a sound proof system to prove this statement. Adding a next-time operator to PAL, we provide formulas that express that belief revision does not take place (...) in PAL. We also discuss relationships between announcements and the new knowledge agents thus acquire; such relationships are related to learning and to Fitch’s paradox. We also show how inverse programs and hybrid logic each can be used to help determine whether or not an arbitrary structure represents the play of a game. We then add a past-time operator to DEL, and discuss the importance of adding yet another component to the language in order to prove completeness. (shrink)

Abstract. The concept of human uniqueness has long played a central role within key interpretations of the hominid fossil record and within numerous theological understandings of the imago Dei. More recently, the status of humans as evolutionarily unique has come under strong criticism owing to the discovery of certain nonhuman hominids who, as language and culture-bearing beings, lived as contemporaries with early anatomically modern humans. Nevertheless, many scholars, including those in the field of religion and science, continue to interpret the (...) remains of these other hominids in light of empirically ungrounded implicit assumptions about human uniqueness, which the author calls “anthropocentrism of the gaps.” This paper argues that “anthropocentrism of the gaps” is philosophically unwarranted and thus should not be assumed by scholars in religion and science when evaluating contemporary findings in paleoanthropology. (shrink)

This paper will ask whether the legal status presently afforded to nonhuman animals ought to influence regulatory debates concerning human cerebral organoids. The New York Courts recently refused to grant a writ of habeas corpus to Happy the Elephant as she was property rather than a legal person while at the same time accepting that she is a moral patient deserving of rights protection. An undesirable situation has therefore arisen in which the law holds a being with moral status to (...) be incapable of benefitting from legal redress due to their legal status as property.The author argues that this is something that we ought to avoid when designing the regulatory framework which will govern the use of human cerebral organoids. Yet, a difference exists in that, whereas the judges already accept Happy is a moral patient, there is presently no consensus around the moral status of organoids. This paper will consider whether human cerebral organoids have passed the moral threshold of sentience. If they have, or are close to doing so, regulators ought to consider their legal status in advance so as to ensure that adequate limitations are placed on this usage so as to avoid unethical practices. (shrink)

Cuteness is one of the most culturally pervasive aesthetics of the new millennium and its rapid social proliferation suggests that the affective responses it provokes find particular purchase in a contemporary era marked by intensive media saturation and spreading economic precarity. Rejecting superficial assessments that would deem the ever-expanding plethora of cute texts trivial, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cutenessdirects serious scholarly attention from a variety of academic disciplines to this ubiquitous phenomenon. The sheer plasticity of this minor aesthetic is (...) vividly on display in this collection which draws together analyses from around the world examining cuteness's fundamental role in cultural expressions stemming from such diverse sources as military cultures, high-end contemporary art worlds,and animal shelters. Pushing beyond prevailing understandings that associate cuteness solely with childhood or which posit an interpolated parental bond as its primary affective attachment, the essays in this collection variously draw connections between cuteness and the social, political, economic, and technological conditions of the early twenty-first century and in doing so generate fresh understandings of the central role cuteness plays in the recalibration of contemporary subjectivities. (shrink)

In our paper ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’ we argued that it would be ethical for men to donate sperm after death for use by strangers. In their thoughtful response Fredrick and Ben Kroon lay out practical concerns regarding our proposal. They raise issues regarding the quality of sperm collected postmortem based on empirical studies. Second, they claim that concerns about quality would make women unlikely to use sperm collected after death. In this response we explore issues (...) of sperm quality in both living and dead donors. We consider whether there might be ways to ensure quality in both. Finally, we question whether quality should be a barrier to women choosing to use sperm donated after death. (shrink)

In his influential history of the post-1967 history of the Palestinian Occupation, radical Israeli architect Eyal Weizman show how even well-meaning decolonial efforts from privileged allies can be coopted by the colonizers, in what I call “de-decolonizing.” Here I focus on one of his examples, namely IDF (Israeli Defense Force) military professors repurposing the anarcho-communist philosophy of French postmodernist Gilles Deleuze into a weapon against Palestinian guerrilla resistance. My conclusion is that attempted decolonizing via (inevitably complicit) privileged allies must include (...) what Weizman calls “co-resistance,” and I call “reconstruction.” In other words, when a Deleuzian “line of flight” to “escape” is impossible, as arguably for Palestinians today, then one should follow the heroic example of the Bedouins, who (as Weizman acknowledges) are the only Arabs who have never stopped rebuilding their Palestine. (shrink)

This article explores the history of Vodou from outlawed African dance to revolutionary magic to depoliticized national Haitian religion and popular dance, its present reduction to Diaspora interpersonal healing, and a possible future. My first section, on Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, reveals Vodou as a sociopolitical construction of racist legal oppression of Africana dances rituals, and artistic-political resistance thereto. My second section, on Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, (...) a “postmodern ethnography” of intersectional oppressions and Black female Haitian resistance in the Diaspora, foregrounds the figure of Gedelia, a feminist variant on Papa Gede, central Vodou spirit (lwa) of resurrection and healing. Finally, my last section, on the “observing participant” analyses of Black dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel’s Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé, finds a dancing Gedelia in her centering of Oyá, a warrior spirit of storms and death. On this basis, I propose the figure of tornadic black angels as a possible magical tool (in Vodou, a pwen, or “point”) intended to re-spiritualize and thereby re-politicize the secularized and whitewashed social Latin dance called “salsa” for social justice. (shrink)

This paper discusses Ernest Sosa's account of knowledge and epistemic normativity. The paper has two main parts. The first part identifies places where Sosa's account requires supplementation if it is going to capture important epistemic phenomena. In particular, additional theoretical resources are needed to explain the way in which epistemic aims are genuinely good aims, and the way in which some forms of reasoning can be epistemically better than others even when they are equally conducive to attaining the truth. The (...) second part focuses on Sosa's claim that there is a kind of belief – judgmental belief – that doesn't merely aim at truth but also aims at aptness, and that this kind of belief is central to our mental lives. The paper raises several concerns about this part of Sosa's account, including the concern that aiming at aptness is overly self-directed, and so is more closely tied to vice than epistemic virtue. (shrink)

This article shows that there is a liar-like paradox that arises for rational credence that relies only on very weak logical and credal principles. The paradox depends on a weak rational reflection principle, logical principles governing conjunction, and principles governing the relationship between rational credence and proof. To respond to this paradox, we must either reject even very weak rational reflection principles or reject some highly plausible logical or credal principle.

This essay is part of larger project in which I attempt to show that Western formal logic, from its inception in Aristotle onward, has both been partially constituted by, and partially constitutive of, what has become known as racism. More specifically, (a) racist/quasi-racist/proto-racist political forces were part of the impetus for logic’s attempt to classify the world into mutually exclusive, hierarchically-valued categories in the first place; and (b) these classifications, in turn, have been deployed throughout history to justify and empower (...) racism/quasi-racism/proto-racism. In other words, (a) an important part of the chaos and messiness that so troubles logic has been the natural bio-cultural diversity of human beings as described by concepts such as race and ethnicity; and (b) once these concepts were historically in place, taken for granted, buttressed with pseudo-science, and had their origins forgotten, they became tools for the oppression of diverse human groups. The central thesis of this essay is that close readings of a variety of Leibniz’s writings (including several essays and one letter) will reveal a pattern of mutual dependency and creation in regard to logic and racism in Leibniz. My conclusion will be that there is a meaningful connection between logic and racism (or at least between logic and politics in general) in Leibniz such that one should be skeptical of his logic’s claim to offer transparent and neutral descriptions of the world as well as imperatives for action. Put differently, I want to ask the following specific question: how do Leibniz’s own racially-informed political goals, along with the emergence of race-centric European colonialism, both invest and disguise themselves within Leibniz’s mathematizing of logic? (shrink)

The recitation of creeds in corporate worship is widespread in the Christian tradition. Intuitively, the use of creeds captures the belief not only of the individuals reciting it, but of the Church as a whole. This paper seeks to provide a philosophical analysis of the meaning of the words, ‘We believe…’, in the context of the liturgical recitation of the Creed. Drawing from recent work in group ontology, I explore three recent accounts of group belief and consider the potential of (...) applying these to the group belief contained in the Creed. (shrink)

This paper concerns the epistemology of difficult moral cases where the difficulty is not traceable to ignorance about non-moral matters. The paper first argues for a principle concerning the epistemic status of moral beliefs about difficult moral cases. The basic idea behind the principle is that one’s belief about the moral status of a potential action in a difficult moral case is not justified unless one has some appreciation of what the relevant moral considerations are and how they bear on (...) the moral status of the potential action. The paper then argues that this principle has important ramifications for moral epistemology and moral metaphysics. It puts pressure on some views of the justification of moral belief, such as ethical intuitionism and reliabilism. It puts pressure on some antirealist views of moral metaphysics, including simple versions of relativism. It also provides some direct positive support for broadly realist views of morality. (shrink)

In addition to his Noble Prize-winning work in economics, Milton Friedman produced some of the most influential philosophical work on the role of government in a free society. Despite his great influence, there remains a dearth of scholarship on Friedman’s social and political philosophy. This paper helps to fill this large void by providing a conceptual analysis of Friedman’s theory of freedom. In addition, I argue that a careful reading of his arguments for freedom ought to lead Friedman, and like-minded (...) liberals and libertarians, to give absolute priority to his negative income tax proposal. A substantial basic income furthers effective economic freedom (on Friedman’s own understanding), redeems his central claim that markets enable cooperation without coercion, and enables him to address his lifelong interlocutors by mitigating concerns for the ways in which economic dependence and inequality undermine both freedom and democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

This article revises received wisdom about the Durkheimian school of sociology and its relationship to Marxism by analyzing the work of Célestin Bouglé, one of the most influential and least examined sociologists of the Durkheimian tradition. Like other better-known Durkheimians of his generation such as Marcel Mauss and Maurice Halbwachs, Bouglé engaged Durkheimian sociology with Marxian and other German traditions of social thought. In the process he also paid an important debt to the French socialists that Marx and so many (...) French Marxists have denigrated as ‘utopian’, especially Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Fourier. In fact, the concerns of Bouglé’s political sociology and Durkheimian sociology more generally are indissociable from the politics of Third Republic France. (shrink)

Ethical violations are becoming common in the business world. Teaching proper ethical behavior can begin in college. In this study, we surveyed 350 students to determine what affects students’ perceptions of the ethics of professors and to determine whether or not taking a course in ethics changes this perception. The most important factor in determining whether or not a professor is ethical is “fairness in grading.” Surprisingly, there was no statistically significant difference between students who took a course in ethics (...) and those who did not in their perception of what makes a professor ethical or unethical. There were some differences, however, between males and females in these perceptions. By learning ethical principle at the college-level, there may be an impact on ethical behavior when in the business world. (shrink)