According to fitting-attitudes accounts of value, the valuable is what there is sufficient reason to value. Such accounts face the famous wrong kind of reason problem. For example, if an evil demon threatens to kill you unless you value him, it may appear that you have sufficient reason to value the demon, although he is not valuable. One solution to this problem is to deny that the demon’s threat is a reason to value him. It is instead a reason to (...) want to value the demon, and to bring it about that you value him. However, many proponents of the wrong kind of reason problem find this solution unmotivated. This paper thus offers a new argument for this solution. The argument turns on the ‘transmission’ of reasons – the familiar fact that there is often reason for one action or attitude because there is reason for another. I observe that putative reasons of the wrong kind transmit in a very different way to other reasons. I then argue that this difference is best explained by the hypothesis that putative reasons of the wrong kind are not reasons for the attitude in question, but are instead reasons to want and bring about that attitude. (shrink)

Some irrational states can be avoided in more than one way. For example, if you believe that you ought to A you can avoid akrasia by intending to A or by dropping the belief that you ought to A. This supports the claim that some rational requirements are wide-scope. For instance, the requirement against akrasia is a requirement to intend to A or not believe that you ought to A. But some writers object that this Wide-Scope view ignores asymmetries between (...) the different ways of avoiding irrationality. In this paper I defend the Wide-Scope view against recent objections of this sort from Mark Schroeder and Niko Kolodny. I argue that once we are clear about what the Wide-Scope view is committed to—and, importantly, what it is not—we can see that Schroeder and Kolodny’s objections fail. (shrink)

This paper defends a 'fitting attitudes' view of value on which what it is for something to be good is for there to be reasons to favour that thing. The first section of the paper defends a 'linking principle' connecting reasons and value. The second and third sections argue that this principle is better explained by a fitting-attitudes view than by 'value-first' views on which reasons are explained in terms of value.

By promoting greater alignment between law and capital, litigation financing has the potential to further escalate the substantial restructuring that is occurring throughout the legal profession. This article examines regulation of the relationship between litigation funders and lawyers in three common law jurisdictions: the United Kingdom; the United States; and Australia, against the backdrop of a sea change in the way in which legal services are being delivered. It argues that a broad prescriptive approach rather than proscriptive prohibitions are the (...) best way to regulate the emerging relationship between law and capital. (shrink)

This article explores the dilemmas of reform in weak states through an examination of efforts to decentralize the fiscal system in post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s. Despite increased attention to the state, many reform efforts still ignore the full implications that state weakness has for institutional transformation. Inattention to the problems of institutional capacity has led to a misdiagnosis of the problems facing intergovernmental institutions in post-Soviet Ukraine. Overcentralization and soft budget constraints built into formal institutional design demand an unrecognized (...) degree of institutional capacity that is frequently weak or absent in the post-Soviet context. In addition, reform measures that fail to take into account the problems of weak institutions have inadvertently reduced the authority of already enfeebled state institutions. (shrink)

The Wide-Scope approach to instrumental reason holds that the requirement to intend the necessary means to your ends should be understood as a requirement to either intend the means, or else not intend the end. In this paper I explain and defend a neglected version of this approach. I argue that three serious objections to Wide-Scope accounts turn on a certain assumption about the nature of the reasons that ground the Wide-Scope requirement. The version of the Wide-Scope approach defended here (...) allows us to reject this assumption, and so defuse the objections. (shrink)

Asymmetric cell division generates two cells that contain different regulatory proteins and express different fates. In an example of asymmetric cell division from B. subtilis, a site on the membrane of the dividing cell is chosen to establish the initial asymmetry. Recent results(1,2) show that a key regulatory protein, SpollE, is localized to one side of a sporulating B. subtilis cell, and subsequently functions in an asymmetric manner. SpollE is a phosphatase at the beginning of a regulatory cascade that leads (...) to activation of a cell fate‐determining transcription factor in only one daughter cell. (shrink)

Based upon Ajit Maan's groundbreaking theory of Internarrative Identity, this collection focuses upon redefining self, slave narrative, the black Caribbean diaspora, and cyberspace to explore the interconnection between identity and life experience as expressed through personal narrative.

Many philosophers accept a response constraint on normative reasons: that p is a reason for you to φ only if you are able to φ for the reason that p. This constraint offers a natural way to cash out the familiar and intuitive thought that reasons must be able to guide us, and has been put to work as a premise in a range of influential arguments in ethics and epistemology. However, the constraint requires interpretation and faces putative counter-examples due (...) to Julia Markovits, Mark Schroeder, and others. This paper develops and motivates an interpretation of the response constraint that avoids the putative counter-examples. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the (...) debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

Perspectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by your perspective, that is, your epistemic position. Objectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by the facts irrespective of your perspective. This paper explores an influential argument for perspectivism which appeals to the thought that the normative is action guiding. The crucial premise of the argument is that you ought to φ only if you are able to φ for the reasons which determine that you ought (...) to φ. We show that this premise can be understood in different ways. On one reading, it provides no support for perspectivism. On another reading, the premise lacks support. So, the argument fails. An important upshot of the paper is that the objectivist can embrace the thought about guidance. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to the recent debate about whether rationality is normative – that is, very roughly, about whether we should have attitudes which fit together in a coherent way. I begin by explaining an initial problem – the “detaching problem” – that arises on the assumption that we should have coherent attitudes. I then explain the prominent “wide-scope” solution to this problem, and some of the central objections to it. I end by considering the options that arise (...) if we reject the wide-scope solution. (shrink)

A number of recent accounts of our first-person knowledge of our attitudes give a central role to transparency - our capacity to answer the question of whether we have an attitude by answering the question of whether to have it. In this paper I raise a problem for such accounts, by showing that there are clear cases of first-person knowledge of attitudes which are not transparent.

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations – incentives for believing – can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a ‘reasoning constraint’ on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show that this (...) argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

In this paper, we claim that, if you justifiably believe that you ought to perform some act, it follows that you ought to perform that act. In the first half, we argue for this claim by reflection on what makes for correct reasoning from beliefs about what you ought to do. In the second half, we consider a number of objections to this argument and its conclusion. In doing so, we arrive at another argument for the view that justified beliefs (...) about what you ought to do must be true, based in part on the idea that the epistemic and practical domains are uniform, in a sense we spell out. We conclude by sketching possible implications of our discussion for the debates over what is wrong with akrasia and pragmatic encroachment on justified belief and knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOn 15 July 2016, a group of soldiers tried to wrestle political control of Turkey from the elected government. The ‘coup attempt’ was declared over within approximately 10 h, but not before more than 300 civilians, police and soldiers had died. This paper examines how Turkish newspapers which are known to be ‘oppositional’ represented events of the night and the following few days before a state of emergency was declared which silenced almost all opposition. Through a close examination of images (...) and written text, we reveal how newspapers fail to question government actions. Instead, an analysis of presuppositions and how social actors and their actions are recontextualised finds that newspapers represent events from the perspective of their political interests whilst not actually questioning the actions of the government. It is in this way that oppositional newspapers use the coup to further their interests at the expense of informing the public. (shrink)

The Wide-Scope view of instrumental reason holds that you should not intend an end without also intending what you believe to be the necessary means. This, the Wide-Scoper claims, provides the best account of why failing to intend the believed means to your end is a rational failing. But Wide-Scopers have struggled to meet a simple Explanatory Challenge: why shouldn't you intend an end without intending the necessary means? What reason is there not to do so? In the first half (...) of this paper, I argue that the Wide-Scope view struggles to meet this challenge because it takes the principles of instrumental reason to have unlimited application—to apply to all agents, in all circumstances. I then go on to offer a new account of these principles. The new account is very much in the spirit of the Wide-Scope view, and shares its central advantages, but lacks its unlimited application. This view should, therefore, find the Explanatory Challenge more tractable. In the second half of the paper, I argue that this prediction is confirmed. If the requirements of instrumental reason apply only when a means is, or is believed to be, necessary for your end, then plausible independent claims, about reasons, rationality, and intentions, explain why failing to intend the necessary means to your ends is a rational failing. (shrink)

You are creditworthy for φ-ing only if φ-ing is the right thing to do. Famously though, further conditions are needed too – Kant’s shopkeeper did the right thing, but is not creditworthy for doing so. This case shows that creditworthiness requires that there be a certain kind of explanation of why you did the right thing. The reasons for which you act – your motivating reasons – must meet some further conditions. In this paper, I defend a new account of (...) these conditions. On this account, creditworthiness requires that your motivating reasons be normative reasons, and that the principles from which you act match normative principles. (shrink)

Recent views of reasons and rationality make it plausible that it can sometimes be rational to do what you have no reason to do. A number of writers have concluded that if this is so, rationality is not normative. But this is a mistake. Even if we assume a tight connection between reasons and normativity, the normativity of rationality does not require that there is always reason to be rational. The first half of this paper illustrates this point with reference (...) to the subjective reasons account of rationality. The second half suggest that this point may have been missed because of certain similarities between the subjective reasons account and the importantly different transparency account. On the transparency account, rationality seems not to be normative. I think it is often assumed that what goes for the transparency account goes for the subjective reasons account as well. But I argue that this is a mistake. A corollary is that the subjective reasons account has an important advantage over the transparency account, given how plausible it is that rationality is normative. (shrink)

Enkratic reasoning—reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing—seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then (...) argue that the best solution is to deny that correctness is always independent of your epistemic position. As I explain, a notable upshot is that a central epistemic norm directs us to believe, not simply what is true, but what we are in a position to know. (shrink)

Donald Davidson is probably the most eminent living analytic philosopher, and his writings in philosophy of language and philosophy of action have shaped much of the recent work in both these fields. However, despite the obvious shared concerns of literary theory and these aspects of philosophy, up to this point literary theorists have not paid much attention to Davidson's ideas or have only known about them through the interpretations of other philosophers like Richard Rorty. Literary theorists have seen more relevance (...) to their concerns in Continental philosophy and, among analytic philosophers, in the essentially anti-analytic work of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein than in the harder tradition of analytic philosophy—more concerned with logic and philosophy of science—represented by the work of Donald Davidson. _Literary Theory after Davidson _challenges both views, stressing the variety of ways in which Davidson's thought can contribute to the development of literary theory. Davidson himself has contributed a new essay to the collection that explores the interrelations between his theories of language and literature. (shrink)

Central to Errol Lord’s The Importance of Being Rational is the notion of a possessed (objective, normative) reason. For Lord, rationality is a matter of correctly responding to possessed reasons, what rationality requires and permits is that we react in ways that are appropriate given our possessed reasons, and we ought – full stop – to react in ways that are decisively supported by our possessed reasons. Thus for Lord, possessed (objective, normative) reasons are very important indeed. This (...) paper raises some challenges about this picture. In §1, I offer objections to Lord’s accounts of rational requirements. In §2, I offer objections to a central argument for his view of what we ought to do. If successful, these objections suggest that possessed reasons are not as important as Lord thinks. In §3, I consider his account of possessed reasons itself. (shrink)

Contentious relations between Türkiye and Greece can be traced back centuries to conflicts such as Ottoman Turks conquering Istanbul which was the centre of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and the 182...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 334-345 [Access article in PDF] Philosophy After Joyce:Derrida and Davidson Reed Way Dasenbrock A GOOD DEAL OF ATTENTION has been paid to James Joyce's influence on literature. Few novelists in the twentieth century have escaped Joyce's influence one way or another, and Robert Martin Adams has even dedicated a book, AfterJoyce, 1 to the proposition that the history of prose fiction is most properly (...) divided into two eras, before and after Joyce. One suspects that Joyce would have appreciated Adams's quasi-blasphemous periodizing.My focus here is Joyce's influence on a different intellectual and cultural realm, philosophy. Joyce's impact on philosophy clearly has not been of the same magnitude. Joyce is not one of those rare figures who have spanned fields or been as important an influence in another field as in his own, unlike Nietzsche, say, or a figure of concern to us here, Jacques Derrida. Joyce's impact on philosophy, thus, is not epoch-changing or field-changing in the way his impact on literature is. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are the two philosophers in the twentieth century whose work have comparably been assessed as epoch-changing. It is worth noting that both men are close contemporaries of Joyce: Wittgenstein, in particular, with his multilingual, Austro-Hungarian, and pan-European character, orientation towards the arts, defiance of so many philosophical conventions, and self-awareness of language, offers a fascinating parallel with Joyce, a parallel already explored to [End Page 334] some extent in the literature. If Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, and Le Corbusier, for example, can be said to exemplify modernist literature, music, painting, and architecture, then Wittgenstein is the exemplification of modernist philosophy. But Modernism, or at least so we are told, is out of fashion and out of date, yet Joyce remains our contemporary in ways many of his fellow modernists may not. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in his continuing presence in contemporary philosophy.The conventional way of writing the history of philosophy in the twentieth century is to divide it into two camps, one oriented towards mathematics, science and logical analysis, a school of philosophy called the analytic or Anglo-American school, the other oriented towards literature and culture and an engagement with the history of philosophy, called the Continental school. That there are a number of problems with this way of mapping the field is by now widely accepted, but no one has successfully replaced this division with anything generally seen to be more adequate, so we continue to use the terms, if as Derrida might say "under erasure." If contemporary analytic philosophy has a single leading figure, I would assign that position to Donald Davidson; continental philosophy has distinct German and French variants, but clearly foremost on the French side is Jacques Derrida. One of the factors leading to our awareness that this bipolar model of the history of twentieth-century philosophy doesn't work very well has been a body of work pointing out a number of similarities between the work of these two philosophers. 2 But what hasn't been pointed out is that both philosophers are interested in Joyce. Thus, the work of Joyce is one of the places the two currents of philosophy merge or at least come into contact. In my opinion, neither Derrida nor Davidson is or deserves to be a crucial figure in Joyce criticism, but looking at their interest in Joyce allows us to trace a neglected chapter in Joyce's influence on the culture and thought of our time and to assess the similarities and differences between the work of these two philosophers.Derrida's work on Joyce includes two essays on Joyce, one an address to the 1984 Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt, "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce," 3 an essay which Margot Norris included in A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses (in abridged form) as one of five exemplary or representative pieces of theoretical approaches to Ulysses (representing deconstruction, of course), and an earlier essay on Finnegans Wake, "Two Words for Joyce... (shrink)

During development one mechanism for generating different cell types is asymmetric cell division, by which a cell divides and contributes different factors to each of its daughter cells. Asymmetric cell division occurs through out the eukaryotic kingdom, from yeast to humans. Many asymmetric cell divisions occur in a defined orientation. This implies a cellular mechanism for sensing direction, which must ultimately lead to differences in gene expression between two daughter cells. In this review, we describe two classes of molecules: regulatory (...) factors that are differentially expressed upon asymmetric cell division, and components of a signal transduction pathway that may define cell polarity. The lin‐11 and mec‐3 genes of C. elegans, the Isl‐1 gene of mammals and the HO gene of yeast, encode regulatory factors that determine cell type of one daughter after asymmetric cell division. The CDC24 and CDC42 genes of yeast affect both bud positioning and orientation of mating projections, and thus may define a general cellular polarity. We speculate that molecules such as Cdc24 and Cdc42 may regulate expression of genes such as lin‐11, mec‐3, Isl‐1 and HO upon asymmetric cell division. (shrink)

Observations have been made about branding’s shift from a material to conceptual focus. Consequently, corporate branding has become more focused on associating and imbuing corporate brands with supposedly positive values and attributes. This article locates this emphasis in the context of Singapore’s marketized higher education sector, and examines how conceptual values like flexibility, freedom and empowerment are expressed linguistically and, more significantly, symbolized in and through photographic images in corporate brand communication. It is argued that while the circulation of conceptual (...) values in branding has arisen in part due to the imperatives of branding, the privileging of values like flexibility, freedom and empowerment is symptomatic of neoliberal capitalist influence and the subjection of higher education in Singapore to a knowledge-based economic logic. This helps to shape stakeholders’ concepts and expectations of higher education as well as public attitudes towards the neoliberal knowledge-based market system more broadly. (shrink)

In an effort to ensure access to justice, Australian courts have fashioned a unique hybrid opt in-opt out process known as “closed classes.” The rationale that underlies closed classes is to prevent free-riding that may undercut the position of funders and class action law firms reliant upon entering into agreements with a critical mass of class members. However, multiple closed classes also pose problems for respondents seeking the comfort of finality. To secure settlement and thus ultimately benefit participating class members, (...) Australian courts have formulated a procedure whereby the closed class is opened and nonparticipating class members are invited to either register their claims or opt out so that thereafter those who do not register and those who opt out are effectively precluded by res judicata from making further related claims. We argue that Australian courts’ support of closed classes, while driven by pragmatism, has produced unintended consequences. Many relate to the ethical dilemmas faced by class action law firms and litigation funders seeking to advance the interests of participating class members over and above those of nonparticipating class members. The Full Federal Court has recently approved an alternative common fund approach. However, questions remain as to whether Australian courts are appropriately equipped to measure and compare the alternative transaction costs associated with the current and proposed approach, and whether they are appropriately equipped to determine the commercial rectitude and fairness of litigation funding agreements. (shrink)

We propose that middle managers’ perceived organizational support enhances their performance through the sequential mediation of their behavioral integrity and follower organizational citizenship behaviors. We test our model with data collected from middle managers, their direct subordinates, and their direct superiors at 18 hotel properties in China. The current study’s findings contribute to the existing literature on perceived organizational support and behavioral integrity. They also add a practical self-interest argument for middle managers’ efforts to maintain their word-action alignment by demonstrating (...) that middle manager behavioral integrity positively affects middle managers’ own task performance ratings, both directly and via its positive effect on subordinates’ organizational citizenship behaviors. (shrink)