This article considers the relationship between the interests of individual litigants and the facilitation of doctrine for the collective good. More specifically, it examines the extent to which the policy and rules governing the management of civil litigation reflect a genuine commitment to the development of the common law. It is argued that litigation models in England send out conflicting messages about the commitment our society has to nurturing precedents and that we remain ambivalent about whether resources should be (...) directed to identifying cases with precedent-setting potential. Contrary to recent policy statements that encourage disputants to resolve issues in private forums such as mediation, this article concludes that the time is ripe to turn our attention to the equally important issue of how to ensure that certain types of cases reach a public forum. (shrink)

In medical ethics, we are often concerned with questions that pertain predominantly to the treatment of a particular individual. However, in a number of cases it is crucial to broaden the scope of our moral inquiry beyond consideration of the individual alone, since the interests of the individual can come into conflict with the interests of the wider community. How should we resolve such conflicts between the interests of the individual and the collective? Most readers of this journal will (...) likely be familiar with the moral theory ‘classical utilitarianism’, which enjoins us to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This theory offers straightforward guidance in such conflicts, since it will typically be the case that the interests of the many will outweigh the interests of the individual in the utilitarian’s moral calculus. However, the simplicity of this approach is typically understood to be an inadequacy of the theory rather than an appropriate solution to these conflicts; contrary to the implications of classic utilitarianism, we would not believe it permissible to kill one innocent person in order to harvest life-saving organs for five others. Of course, adherents of utilitarianism have responded to this sort of problem by refining the theory in various ways. However, one may invoke different kinds of moral apparatus in order to navigate conflicts between the individual and the collective. In this issue, a number of papers engage with moral concepts that are central to different approaches to navigating these conflicts in practical debates. While it may clearly be in the interests of the collective to restrict the transmission of a dangerous infectious pathogen, methods of achieving this aim can be contrary to the interests of the particular individuals targeted by the intervention. Consider quarantine measures; in quarantine, individuals who are merely suspected of carrying …. (shrink)

Strategies for protecting historically disadvantaged groups have been extensively debated in the context of genetic variation research, making this a useful starting point in examining the protection of social groups from harm resulting from biomedical research. We analyze research practices developed in response to concerns about the involvement of indigenous communities in studies of genetic variation and consider their potential application in other contexts. We highlight several conceptual ambiguities and practical challenges associated with the protection of group interests and argue (...) that protectionist strategies developed in the context of genetic research will not be easily adapted to other types of research in which social groups are placed at risk. We suggest that it is this set of conceptual and practical issues that philosophers, ethicists, and others should focus on in their efforts to protect identifiable social groups from harm resulting from biomedical research. (shrink)

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

This book brings together the most important theoretical work of James S. Coleman on problems of collective action. Coleman's work has formed a consistent and highly distinguished attempt to find an account of the workings of social and political processes rooted in the rationality of the individual participants. The chapters address in various ways the fundamental Hobbesian problem of order; the question of how a set of self-interested individuals can arrive at some kind of social order. The volume is (...) organised in three parts. The essays in Part I address the problem of social choice as a fundamental problem of the functioning of social systems. Those in Part II deal with relations of power as a crucial aspect of the relations between individual actions and their social consequences. Part III considers the question of the creation of collectivities and the rights that are allocated under them. As a whole, the volume demonstrates the integration and force of the views Coleman has developed. (shrink)

In Chapter 5 of Liberalism’s Religion, Cécile Laborde considers the freedom and autonomy of religious associations within liberal democratic societies. This paper evaluates her central arguments in that chapter. First, I argue that Laborde makes things too easy for herself in dismissing controversies over the state’s legitimate jurisdictional authority. Second, I argue that Laborde’s view of when associations’ ‘coherence interests’ justify exemptions is too narrow. Third, I consider how we might develop an account of judicial deference to associations’ ‘competence interests’.

We propose in this paper DIAL, a framework for inter-agents dialogue, which formalize a collective decision-making process to compose divergent interests and perspectives. This framework bounds a dialectics system in which argumentative agents play and arbitrate to reach an agreement. For this purpose, we propose an argumentation-based reasoning to manage the conflicts between arguments having different strengths for different agents. Moreover, we propose a model of argumentative agents which justify the hypothesis to which they commit and take into account (...) the commitments of their interlocutors according to their reputations. In the scope of our dialectics system, a third agent is responsible of the final decision outcome which is taken by resolving the conflict between two players according to their competences and the advanced arguments. (shrink)

Collective Action, Philosophy and Law brings together two important strands of philosophical analysis. It combines general philosophical inquiry into collective agency with analyses of specific questions about plural entities and activities in the legal domain. These are issues of growing interest in areas of philosophy like action theory and social ontology, as well as in philosophy of law. The book contains thirteen original chapters written by an international team of leading philosophers and legal theorists, and is divided (...) into four clear parts: The nature of law and of legislative intention Practical reasoning and duties Causality, blameworthiness, and responsibility Citizens, states, and institutions. These sections cut across, and build on, different accounts to advance the debate on classical and new issues in collective agency. Each part also features legal-philosophical analyses that draw on general accounts of collective agency to cast new light on the law, descriptive as well as normatively. Collective Action, Philosophy and Law is the first major interdisciplinary and multi-authored work bridging legal and philosophical approaches to collective agency. As such, it is essential reading for students and researchers of philosophy of law, ethics, political philosophy, jurisprudence, and legal theory. (shrink)

Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription argues that groups have an irreducibly collective right to determine the meaning of their shared group identity, and that such a right is especially important for historically oppressed groups. It provides a novel approach to issues of identity politics, group rights, and racial identity, one which combines and develops the insights of contemporary critical theory and race theory, and will thus be of special interest to scholars in these fields.

This anthology presents recent philosophical analyses of the moral, political, and legal responsibility of groups and their members. Motivated by reflection on such events as the Holocaust, the exploding Ford Pintos, the May Lai massacre, and apartheid in South Africa, the essays consider two questions - what collective efforts could have prevented these large-scale social harms? and is some group to blame and, if so, how is blame to be apportioned? The essays in the first half consider the concept (...) of collective responsibility in light of the debate between individualists and collectivists. In the second half these theoretical discussions are applied to cases involving harms in professional and business contexts, health care, wartime, and racial relations. Collective Responsibility represents the first comprehensive collection on the subject, bringing together a wide diversity of philosophical perspectives. Its theoretical and applied essays should make this collection of interest to both scholars and students interested in ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

The Collected Papers 28 signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner. The title of the volume is taken from one of his most famous and eloquent short essays and probably the best known of his many broadcasts for the BBC. Man's Peril, 1954-55 not only captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid-1950s, its extraordinary impact served to jolt him into political protest once again. The activism of which we glimpse the initial (...) stirrings in this volume continued in various guises more or less without interruption until his death. In the writings assembled in this volume, however, he is looking towards the non-aligned states and world scientific opinion as possible brokers of détente . (The volume includes Russell's famous public statement, the declaration of scientists known as 'The Russell Einstein Manifesto'.) Although Russell was becoming increasingly immersed in work for peace, this was not to the exclusion of all other interests. For example, here we find also him reminiscing about his peace campaigning during the First World War, defending 'History as an Art', and attacking the obscurantism of obscenity legislation and the opponents of birth control. (shrink)

This paper problematises the notions of public or common good as weighed against individual sovereignty in the context of medical research by focusing on genetic research. We propose the notion of collective good as the good of the particular collective in which the research was conducted. We conducted documentary and interview-based research with participant representatives and research leaders concerned with participant involvement in leading genetic research projects and around two recent genetic data controversies: the case of the UK (...) Wellcome Sanger Institute, accused of planning unauthorised commercialisation of African DNA samples, and the case of the company Genuity Science, which planned genetic research on brain tumour samples in Ireland with no explicit patient consent. We advocate for greater specificity in circumscribing the collective to which genetic research relates and for greater efforts in including representatives of this collective as research coleaders in order to enable a more inclusive framing of the good arising from such research. Such community-based participant cogovernance and coleadership in genetic research is vital especially when minorities or vulnerable groups are involved, and it centrally requires community capacity building to help collectives articulate their own notions of the collective good. (shrink)

Collections are the primary sources of classical Turkish literature research. A significant part of the transfer of knowledge of classical Turkish literature, which spans 600 years, has been thanks to collections. Poetry and lyric collections, whose manuscript collections are discussed, also constitute one of the working areas of literary researchers. Reading this book with academic interest and transferring it to today's alphabet sheds light not only on the field of literature, but also on many areas such as the language (...) characteristics, social life, maqam, rhythm and lyric preferences of the period in which the collection was written. With this feature, collections have an important place in the history of Classical Turkish Poetry and Turkish music. At the same time, the literary and musical tastes of the period, which are dominant in the collections, sometimes enter the space. The Systematic Classification of Collections Project undertakes an important task in reintroducing the collections that contain this versatile knowledge into both the academic database and the present day after they are read. Lyrics collection registered in the National Library number A4724, protected within the scope of this project. Periodic language features were not followed in the transcription method. Where there are letters with vowels and spellings different from the main source of the work, they are converted into main sources in footnotes. The data obtained as a result of examining the lyrics collection, which is the subject of the study, is presented and the collection is introduced. Data such as the maqams specified in the lyrics, the names of the lyrics, the meter of the lyrics, the details recorded in the updated lyrics are statistically presented in tabular form. The lyrics of 50 composers who can be identified in the collection consisting of 105 pages are arranged according to the MESTAP table. (shrink)

_The Collected Papers 28 _signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner. The title of the volume is taken from one of his most famous and eloquent short essays and probably the best known of his many broadcasts for the BBC. _Man's Peril, 1954-55_ not only captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid-1950s, its extraordinary impact served to jolt him into political protest once again. The activism of which we glimpse the initial (...) stirrings in this volume continued in various guises more or less without interruption until his death. In the writings assembled in this volume, however, he is looking towards the non-aligned states and world scientific opinion as possible brokers of _détente_. Although Russell was becoming increasingly immersed in work for peace, this was not to the exclusion of all other interests. For example, here we find also him reminiscing about his peace campaigning during the First World War, defending 'History as an Art', and attacking the obscurantism of obscenity legislation and the opponents of birth control. (shrink)

Human beings naturally care a great deal for themselves--and couldn't survive otherwise. As Aquinas observed, the drive for self-preservation is the first law of nature. Yet in the imperative of self-love, philosophers have also perceived a tacit threat. Plato reminds us that 'the excessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offences.' And so the inevitability of self- concern must be balanced with its manifest potential for harm. But how is such a reconciliation possible? (...) This collection brings tohether the efforts of twenty- three great thinkers addressing such themes as the nature of self-interest, its connection to benevolence and morality, and its implications for political theory. The philosophical results are rich and varied. Self-Interest is intended for philosophers, students, and anyone inclined to reflect upon a subject of such enduring importance and perplexity as the love of self. (shrink)

There has been considerable recent interest in the “collective moral autonomy” thesis (CMA), that is, the notion that we can predicate moral successes, failures, and duties of collectives even if there are no comparable successes, failures, and duties among members. One reason why this position looks appealing is because the opposing individualist position seems to have what we might call an accounting problem. Individualists maintain that only individuals can be subjects of moral success, failure, or duty; however, many (...) reasonable judgments about collective actions include moral information on a scale and of a stringency that it does not seem possible to predicate even of the duties of members who have steering power in the actions of the collective. Here I offer a paradigm for thinking about responsibility judgments in organized collective cases to help individualism solve its accounting problem, and allow us to account within a strict individualist perspective for moral information that ostensibly favors CMA. (shrink)

The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament is one of the key actors within the European Union institutional framework for gender equality policies. In the context of this Committee, women’s interests are continuously being defined by discursive and deliberative processes. Civil society actors are being included into these processes of policy-making through institutional funding and public hearings. Through the inclusion of particular organizations and the selection of experts for hearings, existing meanings are being reproduced and/or (...) challenged. The article argues that battlegrounds have been opened in recent years as dominant discourses are questioned by the inclusion and legitimation of new civil society actors. Both the FEMM Committee, as a feminist stronghold, and the established women’s organizations at the EU level are being challenged. It becomes contested who the gender experts are, and diverse understandings of gender equality and women’s interests are being articulated. (shrink)

Can groups of people possess epistemic virtues? There has been some attention to this question in recent years in social epistemology and ethics. Interestingly, most defenses and criticisms of collective virtues so far have focused on proving or disproving that groups can have collective versions of individual virtues. Trying to or disprove that a group can have a good motivation that supervenes motivations of individuals, for example, is a typical strategy. But maybe group virtues are a completely different (...) kind of animal. Does it make sense to demand that they resemble individual virtues? I propose that group virtues can be something different that individual virtues, and whether this is plausible or not depends on the theory we adopt about how virtues are grounded. (shrink)

The Collective Unconscious in the Age of Neuroscience brings the connection between C.G. Jung's theory of a collective unconscious, neuroscience, and personal experiences of severe mental illness to life. Hallie B. Durchslag uses narrative analysis to examine four autobiographical accounts of mental illness, including her own, and illuminate the interplay between psychic material and human physiology that Jung intuited to exist. Durchslag's unique study considers the links between expressions of the collective unconscious, such as myth, fairy tales, (...) folk tales, and 'big dreams', and the experiences of those diagnosed with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The author's personal narrative account of a psychotic episode is at its heart, bringing both an intimate foundation and exceptional insight to the book. With reference to neuroscientific and genetic research throughout, The Collective Unconscious in the Age of Neuroscience highlights the gap between depth psychological notions of etiology and treatment, highlights patterns of collective material in the qualitative experience of these genetic and biological disorders, and explores how the efficacy of pharmacological treatment sheds light on Jung's theoretical model. The Collective Unconscious in the Age of Neuroscience will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, consciousness, neuroscience and mental health. It will also provide unique insight for analytical psychologists interested in severe mental illness and the collective unconscious. (shrink)

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective (...) of the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

The resurgence of interest in collective behavior is in large part due to tools recently made available for conducting laboratory experiments on groups, statistical methods for analyzing large data sets reflecting social interactions, the rapid growth of a diverse variety of online self‐organized collectives, and computational modeling methods for understanding both universal and scenario‐specific social patterns. We consider case studies of collective behavior along four attributes: the primary motivation of individuals within the group, kinds of interactions among (...) individuals, typical dynamics that result from these interactions, and characteristic outcomes at the group level. With this framework, we compare the collective patterns of noninteracting decision makers, bee swarms, groups forming paths in physical and abstract spaces, sports teams, cooperation and competition for resource usage, and the spread and extension of innovations in an online community. Some critical issues surrounding collective behavior are then reviewed, including the questions of “Does group behavior always reduce to individual behavior?”“Is ‘group cognition’ possible?” and “What is the value of formal modeling for understanding group behavior?”. (shrink)

This volume collects together Russell's philosophical writings during the period from 1947-68. For about half of this period Russell worked steadily at philosophy but after the publication of _My Philosophical Development_ in 1959 he retired from academic philosophy for the second time. After that date, only the occasional philosophical piece appeared, as he was preoccupied with political writings. In this volume there are a handful of papers dated later than 1959, and all of these were certainly written by Russell himself. (...) This volume contains Russell's writings on diverse philosophical interests, including autobiographical and self-critical papers, critiques of other philosophers and his controversial opinions on Christianity. (shrink)

Générations futures, animaux, rivières, espèces, écosystèmes, œuvres d’art, androïdes. La liste des entités non-humaines (ou non-individuelles) aspirant à la personnalité juridique s’allonge. Un nombre croissant d’État leur attribuent des droits dans le but de les protéger, avec plus ou moins de succès, en tant qu’entité à part entière. L’article 71 de la Constitution de l’Équateur figure parmi les exemples les plus marquants puisqu’il fait de la Nature ( Pacha Mama ) un sujet de droits au nom desquels on compte le (...) droit au respect de son existence et le droit à la régénération de ses cycles vitaux. La vulnérabilité de ces entités non-humaines appelle une protection dépassant les intérêts individuels. Souvent dépourvues de la personnalité juridique, ces entités ne peuvent pas agir en justice par elles-mêmes. Leurs intérêts, bien que de plus en plus protégés par les normes juridiques, demeurent partiellement défendus par l’appareil juridictionnel. Au-delà de la résistance de nos imaginaires politiques, cela s’explique par la difficulté théorique et pratique d’ouvrir l’accès au prétoire à des requérants agissant au nom d’autrui, en l’occurrence de ces entités. Ce sont les obstacles juridiques que nous tentons ici de lever. Le principe Nul ne plaide par procureur interdit à toute personne d’agir en défense d’un droit subjectif qui ne lui appartiendrait pas en propre, sans requérir un mandat de représentation du bénéficiaire du droit. L’intérêt pour agir que l’on présente comme la condition sine qua non de recevabilité de l’action se caractérise, en substance, par l’intérêt lésé du requérant. Les actions en justice dans l’intérêt d’autrui ne sont admises que par exception et sans que les concepts doctrinaux ne les embrassent pleinement. L’action en justice tout autant que la protection juridique des intérêts ont été pensées presque exclusivement par le prisme des intérêts et des besoins humains et individuels. La reconnaissance de droits aux non-humains rebat les cartes du droit processuel. Il faut repenser l’intérêt à agir comme condition de recevabilité susceptible d’être caractérisée par une motivation du requérant qui puisse être autre que la lésion de son propre droit. Il faut élargir la catégorie des bénéficiaires de droit aux entités, quelles qu’elles soient, dont les intérêts sont objectivement protégés par des normes juridiques. Il faut concevoir l’action en justice comme subordonnées non pas à un intérêt personnel du requérant mais à une norme d’habilitation dont le contenu est laissé à la décision des autorités normatives. Les voies processuelles peuvent accueillir une grande diversité de configurations. Il appartient à la sphère politique de pondérer la nécessité de garantir les droits sans encourager l’engorgement du prétoire. Toutefois, intégré au sein de ce que l’on appelle les « grandes causes », le contentieux des droits des non-humains participe à la transformation du rôle la justice dans nos systèmes. En dépassant le règlement des conflits individuels, elle doit aujourd’hui se prononcer sur des questions qui sont habituellement discutées au sein des arènes démocratiques ( cause lawyering ). JEL Codes : K380, K410. (shrink)

The Collected Works of Spinoza provides, for the first time in English, a truly satisfactory edition of all of Spinoza's writings, with accurate and readable translations, based on the best critical editions of the original-language texts, done by a scholar who has published extensively on the philosopher's work. This first volume contains Spinoza's single most important work, the Ethics, and four earlier works: the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, Descartes' (...) "Principles of Philosophy," and Metaphysical Thoughts. Also included are Spinoza's letters from the periods when these works were being written. The elaborate editorial apparatus—including prefaces, notes, glossary, and indexes—assists the reader in understanding one of the world's most fascinating, but also most difficult, philosophers. Of particular interest is the glossary-index, which provides extensive commentary on Spinoza's technical vocabulary. A milestone of scholarship more than forty-five years in the making, The Collected Works of Spinoza is an essential edition for anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza or the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Individual rational action consists of (i) knowing what you want, (ii) taking proper steps to approach what you want as closely as possible, within the confines of the law. This one can learn, although some people are more skilled in it than others. Modern democracies are set up in such a way that they leave as much room as possible for individual rational action. Education for citizenship is sometimes taken to be: getting young citizens acquainted with the legal possibilities for (...) maximizing their individual interests. How about collective rational action? Game theory shows that if people engage in individual rational action, the common good suffers. This is known as ‘the tragedy of the commons’. It was also known in Antiquity: ”What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it” (Aristotle). To understand the issues involved we will analyse the notions of ”common knowledge”, ”individual commitment” and ”collective intention”. (shrink)

How can we effectively promote the public’s prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 infection? Jordan et al. found with United States samples that emphasizing either self-interest or collective-interest of prevention behaviors could promote the public’s prevention intention. Moreover, prosocially framed messaging was more effective in motivating prevention intention than self-interested messaging. A dual consideration of both cultural psychology and the literature on personalized matching suggests the findings of Jordan et al. are counterintuitive, because persuasion is most effective when (...) the frame of the message delivered and the recipient of the message are culturally congruent. In order to better understand the potential influence of culture, the current research aimed to replicate and extend Jordan et al. findings in the Japanese context. Specifically, we examined the question whether the relative effectiveness of the prosocial appeal is culturally universal and robust, which types of ‘others’ especially promote prevention intention, and which psychological mechanisms can explain the impact of messaging on prevention intention. In Study 1, we confirmed that self-interested framed, prosocially framed, and the combination of both types of messaging were equally effective in motivating prevention intention. In Study 2, we found that family-framed messaging also had a promoting effect similar to that from self-interested and prosocial appeals. However, the relative advantage of prosocial appeals was not observed. Further, a psychological propensity relevant to sensitivity to social rejection did not moderate the impact of messaging on prevention intention in both studies. These results suggest that since engaging in the infection control itself was regarded as critical by citizens after public awareness of COVID-19 prevention has been sufficiently heightened, for whom we should act might not have mattered. Further, concerns for social rejection might have had less impact on the prevention intentions under these circumstances. These results suggest that the relative advantage of a prosocial appeal might not be either culturally universal or prominent in a collectivistic culture. Instead, they suggest that the advantages of such an appeal depends on the more dynamic influence of COVID-19 infection. (shrink)

This book examines the issue of rational cooperation, especially cooperation between people with conflicting moral commitments. The first part considers how the two main aspects of cooperation - the choice by a group of a particular cooperative scheme and the decision by each member to contribute to that scheme - can be understood as guided by reason. The second part explores how the activity of reasoning itself can take a cooperative form. The book is distinctive in offering an account of (...) what people can accomplish by reasoning together, of the role of deliberation in democratic decision making, and of the negotiation of the proper use of concepts. Presenting for the first time a detailed analysis of the general problem of cooperation and collective reasoning between people with different moral commitments, this book will be of particular interest to philosophers of the social sciences and to students in political science, sociology and economics. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 1 begins with a brief autobiography, and examines the development and progress of scientific practice and knowledge. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the concept of collective responsibility is relevant to ongoing normative debates in social and political philosophy. Individual chapters address issues such as the relationship between collective obligations and collective responsibility, the kinds of groups which can be the subjects of collective responsibility and obligations, and the relationship between the obligations of groups and the obligations of individual members of those groups. The book also puts these (...) concepts to work in a number of applied cases, including questions around corporate responsibility and responsibility of AI, or debates about the responsibilities of individuals in relationship to questions about state wrong-doing, or the obligations of allies of marginalised social groups. The guiding principle of the book is that by taking both the theoretical and the applied issues seriously, we can gain new insights into the structure of collective responsibility and its practical implications. In addition to drawing on technical contributions of social ontology, the book is interested in what our real-life practices reveal to us about collective responsibility. The further question is should some of our institutional practices be revised in light of the implicit ontological claims that they make. This book appeals to academics and students in philosophy, political theory and legal studies, especially graduates and postgraduates. (shrink)

Détente or Destruction, 1955-57 continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertrand Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some sixty-one articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over fifty of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of Collected Papers ( Man's Peril, 1954-55 ). Continuing with the (...) theme of nuclear peril, this volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban. In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. Russell not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties, he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes seven interviews ranging from East-West Relations after the Geneva conference to a Meeting with Russell. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and yet misunderstood philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Long unavailable, _Collected Essays 1929-1968: Collected Papers Volume 2_ stands as testament to the astonishing breadth of Ryle’s philosophical concerns. This volume showcases Ryle’s deep interest in the notion of thinking and contains many of his major pieces, including his classic essays ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, ‘Philosophical Arguments’, ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, and ‘A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking’. He ranges over (...) an astonishing number of topics, including feelings, pleasure, sensation, forgetting and concepts and in so doing hones his own philosophical stance, steering a careful path between behaviourism and Cartesianism. Together with the _Collected Papers Volume 1 _and the new edition of _The Concept of Mind_, these outstanding essays represent the very best of Ryle’s work. Each volume contains a substantial preface by Julia Tanney, and both are essential reading for any student of twentieth-century philosophies of mind and language. _Gilbert Ryle_ was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics and Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, an editor of _Mind_, and a president of the Aristotelian Society. _Julia Tanney_ is Senior Lectuer at the University of Kent, and has held visiting positions at the University of Picardie and Paris-Sorbonne. (shrink)

This collection of Professor S. Sastri's work indicates the depth of his contribution to Indian philosophy. The reader will find his development of Bradley's Idealism in the light of the Advaita tradition to be of special philosophic interest.--D. P. B.

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 1 begins with a brief autobiography, and examines the development and progress of scientific practice and knowledge. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 3 contains lectures and essays spanning thirty years of campaigning about the importance of science in education. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. In Volume 4, Huxley turns to the issue of faith and science, examining the apparent conflict between theology and evolution. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 8 contains public lectures given by Huxley, on themes as diverse as yeast, lobsters and palaeontology. (shrink)

Charles Baudouin was a French psychoanalyst. Born in Nancy, a town that played a significant role in the history of psychoanalysis, he was a contemporary of Freud, Jung and Adler. After receiving his degree in philosophy, he moved to Geneva where his early work and first book focused on suggestion and hypnosis, later becoming interested in literature and the relation between psychoanalysis and education. Largely forgotten, Charles Baudouin’s work warrants greater attention from psychoanalysts and historians alike. He was a prolific (...) author throughout his career; the _Collected Works of Charles Baudouin _is an opportunity to revisit some of his finest works. (shrink)

_Détente or Destruction, 1955-57_ continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertrand Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some sixty-one articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over fifty of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of _Collected Papers_. Continuing with the theme of nuclear peril, this (...) volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban. In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. Russell not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties, he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes seven interviews ranging from East-West Relations after the Geneva conference to a Meeting with Russell. (shrink)

We seem to ascribe mental states and agency to groups. We say ‘Google knows such-and-such,’ or ‘Amazon intends to do such-and-such.’ This observation of ordinary parlance also found its way into philosophical accounts of social groups and collective intentionality. However, these discussions are usually quiet about how groups self-ascribe their own beliefs and intentions. Apple might explain to its shareholders that it intends to bring a new iPhone to the market next year. But how does Apple know what it (...) intends? How do groups get to know their own mental states? This is the question of collective self-knowledge. I argue that collective self-knowledge is a distinct phenomenon that deserves our attention. In particular I suggest: that we should be interested in collective self-knowledge, because our behaviour indicates that we already engage with collective self-knowledge in practice; that groups can collectively avow, which indicates that they have privileged and peculiar access to their own intentional states; and that collective self-knowledge is not reducible to intentional states of individuals and therefore is an independent explanandum. (shrink)

In recent decades, an increasing interest in the dynamics of collections has brought to view how objects circulate as parts of networks of knowledge and how collections can acquire new meanings. Introducing this special issue on Collections, Knowledge, and Time, we want to shift focus from geographical circulation towards the temporal dynamics of collections: the layering and interweaving of asynchronous temporalities as collections are preserved, frozen, reinterpreted, sampled, and destroyed over time, and how these temporalities constitute knowledge potentials. We (...) treat collections broadly across museums of history of medicine, history of science, and ethnography, and scientific institutions including biobanks, seed banks, and fly centres, to investigate the considerable overlap in collection practices, as well as how objects can move between cultural historical and scientific uses. We limit ourselves, however, to epistemic collections, mainly scientific ones, assembled with research as a main purpose. This introduction first explores apparently mundane collection practices such as preservation and care, as well as technologies such as freezers and boxes, to unravel them as temporal practices that make stored items transcend time. We then discuss historical practices across cultural and scientific collections to show how historical thinking plays a central part in scientific collection work and how new scientific methods shape investigations of the past. Finally, we outline the potentialities for future knowledge in collections. In conclusion, we sketch out a pluralist epistemology of collections focusing specifically on how the dynamics of time create multiple epistemic potentials for historical scholarship and scientific research in the present and future. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 9 includes lectures delivered at Oxford University on the relationship between scientific thought and ethical problems. (shrink)

Kurt Godel was the most outstanding logician of the twentieth century, famous for his work on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis. He is also noted for his work on constructivity, the decision problem, and the foundations of computation theory, as well as for the strong individuality of his writings on the philosophy of mathematics. Less well-known is his discovery of unusual cosmological models for Einstein's (...) equations, permitting "time-travel" into the past. This second volume of a comprehensive edition of Godel's works collects together all his publications from 1938 to 1974. Together with Volume I (Publications 1929-1936), it makes available for the first time in a single source all of his previously published work. Continuing the format established in the earlier volume, the present text includes introductory notes that provide extensive explanatory and historical commentary on each of the papers, a facing English translation of the one German original, and a complete bibliography. Succeeding volumes are to contain unpublished manuscripts, lectures, correspondence, and extracts from the notebooks. Collected Works is designed to be accessible and useful to as wide an audience as possible without sacrificing scientific or historical accuracy. The only complete edition available in English, it will be an essential part of the working library of professionals and students in logic, mathematics, philosophy, history of science, and computer science. These volumes will also interest scientists and all others who wish to be acquainted with one of the great minds of the twentieth century. (shrink)