One clear indication of the increasing use of the written word in western Europe from the twelfth century onwards was the compilation of an unprecedentedly diverse and numerous body of legal texts. In part, the growing textualization of law built on earlier foundations. This was particularly true of Roman law, whose rediscovery in Italy in the late eleventh century led to a revival in the study of law. At the same time, the expansion of papal power from the second half (...) of the eleventh century accelerated the production of new collections of canon law, whose compilers sought to impose order upon a mass of written law going back to the earliest councils of the church and also to integrate contemporary additions to that law resulting from conciliar and papal legislation. Yet the diversification of legal writing also owed much to the compilation of texts of secular customary law, in both Latin and the vernacular. In some societies, such as Iceland and Scandinavia, these texts marked the beginning of written law; in others, including England, France, Germany, and, above all, Italy, where law and legislation had been written earlier in the Middle Ages, the custom of particular kingdoms or provinces was committed to writing in new forms with the compilation of coutumiers. Although their relationship to earlier Welsh legal writing is unclear, the lawbooks of medieval Wales provide a further instance of this textualization of secular custom. (shrink)

Robert Rees Davies, a Fellow of the British Academy, was a highly original historian who offered compelling new insights into medieval society through a body of work focused on Britain and Ireland and, above all, Wales. He deployed his formidable public skills as a chair of committees and eloquent promoter and advocate of the cause of history. To a considerable extent, Rees Davies' work as a historian was influenced by his higher education at University College London and the University of (...) Oxford, as well as by the example of Marc Bloch and of other French historians. He was born at Glanddwynant, Caletwr, near Llandderfel in Merioneth, the fourth and youngest son of William Edward and Sarah Margaret Davies. The publication in 1987 of Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales 1063–1415, which won the Wolfson Literary Award for History, further enhanced Rees Davies' reputation as a scholar. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year. (shrink)

This volume brings together fourteen major essays by one of contemporary philosophy's most challenging thinkers. Huw Price links themes from Quine, Carnap, Wittgenstein and Rorty, to craft a powerful critique of contemporary naturalistic metaphysics. He offers a new positive program for philosophy, cast from a pragmatist mould.

Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way round? The universe began with the Big Bang - will it end with a `Big Crunch'? Now in paperback, this book presents an innovative and controversial view of time and contemporary physics. Price urges physicists, philosophers, and anyone who has ever pondered the paradoxes of time to look at the world from a fresh perspective, and throws fascinating new light (...) on some of the great mysteries of the universe. (shrink)

Like coastal cities in the third millennium, important areas of human discourse seem threatened by the rise of modern science. The problem isn't new, of course, or wholly unwelcome. The tide of naturalism has been rising since the seventeenth century, and the rise owes more to clarity than to pollution in the intellectual atmosphere. All the same, the regions under threat are some of the most central in human life--the four Ms, for example: Morality, Modality, Meaning and the Mental. Some (...) of the key issues in contemporary metaphysics concern the place and fate of such concepts in a naturalistic world view. (shrink)

Frequent observation: sexualities, self‐surveillance, confession and the construction of the active patient Following Foucault’s analyses of the development of the disciplinary power of the medical gaze, this paper describes the themes that are relocating the ‘active patient’ as the central object of health scrutiny by professionals. A key element in these discourses has been the deployment of power through disciplinary knowledge and techniques of social control through ritual forms of confession, thereby positing the patient/client as the subject of self‐surveillance. The (...) individual is also engaged their own sexuality, performativity and ‘truths’ of sexual experience. These Foucauldian insights have constructed the notion of surveillance medicine, whereby with the assistance of professional technologies, not only the patient’s body but also the ‘self’ can be probed through incitement to confess. However, the actor is not docile; resistances to disciplinary techniques are evident and within the professional practices of the clinic, there is resistance to the power of the erotic. The paper draws on recent research on the social construction of male sexualities in the fields of genitourinary practice, and explores how the ceremonial practices of the clinic engage with the rise of surveillance medicine and the medicalisation of everyday life. The individual actor is exhorted to engage in increased sexual and medical self‐surveillance and to be recruited in the project of becoming an ‘active patient’. It concludes with an examination of some of the implications this surveillance of self may have for practitioners in terms of power and the professional lens through which the sexualised, symbolic body is viewed. (shrink)

In defending so-called global expressivism I have often seen Carnap as an ally. Both Carnap’s rejection of “externalist” metaphysics and his implicit pluralism about linguistic frameworks seem grist for the global expressivist’s mill. André Carus argues for a third point of connection, via Carnap’s voluntarism. I note two reasons for thinking that this connection is not as close as Carus contends.

A contribution to the sixth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” this article focuses on the early-twentieth-century Quaker historian and philosopher of mysticism, Rufus Jones, who treated Quietism as in polar opposition to the work of Quakerism “here in this world.” Consequently, he placed Quietism within a negatively-constructed framework of belief, identifying much of its influence in Quaker history on the spiritual teachings of the Miguel de Molinos, Madame Guyon, and François Fénelon. This article examines Jones's premise (...) that Quietism was “no more than a noble mood, too rare and abstract to be translated into real human life.” It contends that Jones's aversion to Quietist influences in Quaker history had more to do with his own personal ambivalences, his response to the violence of World War I, his modernizing agenda, and his distorted understanding of Quietist spirituality than with anything inherent to Quietism itself. (shrink)

Does artificial intelligence (AI) pose existential risks to humanity? Some critics feel this question is getting too much attention, and want to push it aside in favour of conversations about the immediate risks of AI. These critics now include the journal Nature, where a recent editorial urges us to 'stop talking about tomorrow's AI doomsday when AI poses risks today.' We argue that this is a serious failure of judgement, on Nature's part. In science, as in everyday life, we expect (...) influential actors to consider the consequences of error. As the world's leading scientific journal, Nature is certainly an influential actor, especially so in the absence of robust global regulation of AI. Yet it has manifestly failed to consider the cost of error in this case. (shrink)

Plato’s Politicus argues for a striking normative claim about the law: the ideal expert ruler will not only change the laws of the city when he thinks it best, but will also contravene them. The Eleatic Stranger’s argument for this conclusion reveals important features of Plato’s views on expertise in general, and political expertise in particular. Laws should not be inviolable for an expert ruler because no craft lays down inviolable rules for its practitioners. There are no inviolable rules of (...) action for experts because crafts are teleological: expert action aims only to produce some good. The expert ruler’s political action recognizes no constraints besides the aim of best promoting the good condition of the whole city. Plato believes that the statesman will do markedly better at promoting this end when unconstrained by even the best laws, and there is evidence that he will harm individual citizens in order to do so. (shrink)

Huw Lloyd Williams looks at the critical debate surrounding John Rawls' The Law of Peoples. He responds to the work of cosmopolitan theorists and Amartya Sen, arguing that Rawls offers a persuasive and prescient moral approach to issues of global poverty and development.

In “A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance,” David Lewis says that he is “led to wonder whether anyone but a subjectivist is in a position to understand objective chance.” The present essay aims to motivate this same Lewisean attitude, and a similar degree of modest subjectivism, with respect to objective causation. The essay begins with Newcomb problems, which turn on an apparent tension between two principles of choice: roughly, a principle sensitive to the causal features of the relevant situation, and (...) a principle sensitive only to evidential factors. Two-boxers give priority to causal beliefs, and one-boxers to evidential beliefs. The essay notes that a similar issue can arise when the modality in question is chance, rather than causation. In this case, the conflict is between decision rules based on credences guided solely by chances, and rules based on credences guided by other sorts of probabilistic evidence. Far from excluding cases of the latter kind, Lewis’s Principal Principle explicitly allows for them, in the form of the caveat that credences should follow beliefs about chances only in the absence of “inadmissible evidence.” The essay then exhibits a tension in Lewis’s views on these two matters, by presenting a class of decision problems—some of them themselves Newcomb problems—in which Lewis’s view of the relevance of inadmissible evidence seems in tension with his causal decision theory. It offers a diagnosis for this dilemma and proposes a remedy, based on an extension of a proposal due to Ned Hall and others from the case of chance to that of causation. The remedy suggests a new view of the relation between causal decision theory and evidential decision theory, namely, that they stand to each other much as chance stands to credence, being objective and subjective faces of the same practical coin. This has much the same metaphysical benefits as Lewis’s own view of chance and also throws interesting new light on Newcomb problems, providing an irenic resolution of the apparent disagreement between causal and evidential decision rules. (shrink)

I discuss the relationship between the two forms of expressivism defended by Robert Brandom, on one hand, and philosophers in the Humean tradition, such as Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard, on the other. I identify three apparent points of difference between the two programs, but argue that all three are superficial. Both projects benefit from the insights of the other, and the combination is in a natural sense a global expressivism.

It has often been suggested that retrocausality offers a solution to some of the puzzles of quantum mechanics: e.g., that it allows a Lorentz-invariant explanation of Bell correlations, and other manifestations of quantum nonlocality, without action-at-a-distance. Some writers have argued that time-symmetry counts in favour of such a view, in the sense that retrocausality would be a natural consequence of a truly time-symmetric theory of the quantum world. Critics object that there is complete time-symmetry in classical physics, and yet no (...) apparent retrocausality. Why should the quantum world be any different? This note throws some new light on these matters. I call attention to a respect in which quantum mechanics is different, under some assumptions about quantum ontology. Under these assumptions, the combination of time-symmetry without retrocausality is unavailable in quantum mechanics, for reasons intimately connected with the differences between classical and quantum physics (especially the role of discreteness in the latter). Not all interpretations of quantum mechanics share these assumptions, however, and in those that do not, time-symmetry does not entail retrocausality. (shrink)

The diagnosis of schizophrenia causes no end of contention. Controversial for almost as long as it has been classified, schizophrenia has been called "the sacred symbol of psychiatry", "the sublime object of psychiatry", and simply a "scientific delusion". Calls have been made to "reconstruct" schizophrenia, "reconceive" schizophrenia, and simply dispense with the term altogether.Meanwhile, high-profile psychiatrists promote the view that schizophrenia is a brain disease, although neither of these...

Global Justice: The Basics is a straightforward and engaging introduction to the theoretical study and practice of global justice. It examines the key political themes and philosophical debates at the heart of the subject, providing a clear outline of the field and exploring: the history of its development the current state of play its ongoing interdisciplinary development. Using case studies from around the world which illustrate the importance of the debates at the heart of global justice, as well as activist (...) campaigns for global justice, the book examines a wide range of theoretical debates from thinkers worldwide making it ideal for those seeking a balanced introduction to global justice. (shrink)

Global supply chains (GSCs) present the International Labour Organization (ILO) with a challenge that goes to the heart of its founding mandate and structure, one built on the prominence of nation states and national representatives of employers and workers. In February 2020, discussions in the ILO on the rise of GSCs reached deadlock. To fully understand why the ILO has been unable to address decent work deficits in GSCs greater attention needs to be paid to contestation, power and legitimacy in (...) the deliberation of labour governance. Drawing on the concept of agonistic pluralism we examine the evolution of the ILO’s attempt to establish a new labour standard on GSCs under three empirical phases between 2002 and 2020. We argue that shifting power asymmetries between the tripartite constituents of governments, employers and workers, increased counter-hegemonic contestation, and intensified questioning of the deliberative legitimacy of the adversaries, explain the dissensual relations at the ILO. This article contributes to the literature on labour standards in GSCs in demonstrating how and why contestation underpins the evolution of labour governance over time. (shrink)

This essay is my contribution to a celebratory volume for Mr Peter Ho, former head of Singapore's Civil Service, from whom I learned the phrase ‘black elephant’. I reflect on four elephants among my own interests: in other words, big things (in my estimation), in clear sight but invisible to many eyes. They are: (i) retrocausality in quantum theory; (ii) child conscription and the monarchy; (iii) AI risk; and (iv) cold fusion. As I say in the piece, my little herd (...) is big enough to make some comparisons – though this may be the only occasion on which they congregate in the same room. (shrink)

Philosophy, like modern agriculture, is a little too prone to monoculture. Happily, unpopular philosophical traditions are less in danger of complete extinction than varieties of apple, say, or breeds of pig. For this difference, however, the subject is often indebted to a few far-sighted individuals who appreciate the value of presently unfashionable ideas – who stand ready to reinvigorate the gene pool, when popular approaches succumb to pests and inbreeding.

CSR is now an important issue for all companies, large and small. Companies are under pressure to behave responsibly from their consumers, in their purchasing activities, from the government and regulators, from the investment community and from potential employees.

The status and respectability of alethic modality was always a point of contention and divergence between naturalism and empiricism. It poses no problems in principle for naturalism, since modal vocabulary is an integral part of all the candidate naturalistic base vocabularies. Fundamental physics is above all a language of laws; the special sciences distinguish between true and false counterfactual claims; and ordinary empirical talk is richly dispositional. By contrast, modality has been a stumbling-block for the empiricist tradition ever since Hume (...) forcefully formulated his epistemological and ultimately semantic objections to the concepts of law and necessary connection. (, Lecture , §). (shrink)

Probabilistic accounts of causality have long had trouble with ‘spurious’ evidential correlations. Such correlations are also central to the case for causal decision theory—the argument that evidential decision theory is inadequate to cope with certain sorts of decision problem. However, there are now several strong defences of the evidential theory. Here I present what I regard as the best defence, and apply it to the probabilistic approach to causality. I argue that provided a probabilistic theory appeals to the notions of (...) agency and effective strategy, it can avoid the problem of spurious causes. I show that such an appeal has other advantages; and argue that it is not illegitimate, even for a causal realist. (shrink)

This paper suggests a novel reinterpretation of the mathematical core of Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, and hence a new route to the conclusion that the temporal asymmetry of classical electromagnetic radiation has the same origin as that of thermodynamics. The argument begins (Sec. 2) with a careful analysis of what the apparent asymmetry of radiation actually involves. Two major flaws in the standard version of the Wheeler-Feynman treatment of radiative asymmetry are then identified (Secs. 4–5), and the proposed reinterpretation is described (...) (Sec. 6). This avoids the two flaws previously mentioned, and also the problematic dependence of radiation on cosmological structure. (shrink)

[email: huw@extro.su.oz.au] If recent literature is to be our guide, the main place of philosophy in the study of the mind would seem to be to determine the place of psychology in the study of the world. One distinctive kind of answer to this question begins by noting the central role of intentionality in psychology, and goes on to argue that this sets psychology apart from the natural sciences. Sometimes to be thus set apart is to be exiled, or rejected, (...) but more often it is a protective move, intended to show that psychology is properly insulated from the reductionist demands of natural science. I am interested here in the general issue as to how this move to insulate intentional psychology should best be characterised-how to make sense of the idea that there can be a legitimate enterprise of this kind. I shall concentrate on what is perhaps the best known version of such a view, that of Daniel Dennett. I think that my conclusions apply to other versions as well, but Dennett provides a particularly accessible example. (shrink)

In the first chapter of From Metaphysics to Ethics, Frank Jackson begins, as he puts it, ‘by explaining how serious metaphysics by its very nature raises the location problem.’ (1998, p. 1) He gives us two examples of location problems. The first concerns semantic properties, such as truth and reference: Some physical structures are true. For example, if I were to utter a token of the type ‘Grass is green’, the structure I would thereby bring into existence would be true (...) ... How are the semantic properties of the sentence related to the non-semantic properties of the sentence? Where, if anywhere, are the semantic properties of truth, content and reference to be found in the non-semantic, physical or naturalistic account of the sentence?’ (1998, p. 2) Jackson notes two possible answers to questions of this kind. The first denies that there are any such semantic properties. (shrink)

This article revisits materialist second-wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour, it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms to deliver social reproductive labour via the market in a context in which reproductive labour sits at the centre of an (...) intense time squeeze. It reflects on the implications of the commodification of domestic labour for feminist strategy. The author points to the inadequacy in this context of traditional feminist strategies—for the socialisation of domestic labour through public services, wages for housework or labour-saving through technological solutions—concluding that new strategies are needed that address the underlying social relations that perpetuate unequal divisions of labour in contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

This is a review of Zalabardo's Pragmatist Semantics (OUP, 2023), forthcoming in Mind.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking (...) their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics. (shrink)

Since the late nineteenth century, physics has been puzzled by the time-asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomena in the light of the apparent T-symmetry of the underlying laws of mechanics. However, a compelling solution to this puzzle has proved elusive. In part, I argue, this can be attributed to a failure to distinguish two conceptions of the problem. According to one, the main focus of our attention is a time-asymmetric lawlike generalisation. According to the other, it is a particular fact about the (...) early universe. This paper aims (i) to distinguish these two different conceptions of the time-asymmetric explanandum in thermodynamics; (ii) to argue in favour of the latter; and (iii) to show that whichever we choose, our rational expectations about the thermodynamic behaviour of the future must depend on what we know about the past: contrary to the common view, statistical arguments alone do not give us good reason to expect that entropy will always continue to increase. (shrink)

To appear in David Chalmers, Ryan Wasserman and David Manley, eds., Metametaphysics (OUP, 2009).

Proponents of causal decision theories argue that classical Bayesian decision theory (BDT) gives the wrong advice in certain types of cases, of which the clearest and commonest are the medical Newcomb problems. I defend BDT, invoking a familiar principle of statistical inference to show that in such cases a free agent cannot take the contemplated action to be probabilistically relevant to its causes (so that BDT gives the right answer). I argue that my defence does better than those of Ellery (...) Eells and Richard Jeffrey; and that it applies, where necessary, to other types of Newcomb problem. (shrink)