What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject (...) that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

Bill Brewer presents an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. He argues that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. This fresh approach to epistemology turns away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and works instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes the interesting, but obscure claim that the normative constraints that constitute the objectivity of our representations have their source ultimately in transcendental apperception. Keller focuses on this claim. He interprets Kant’s condition of transcendental apperception as the claim that I must represent myself in an impersonal way, and he argues that impersonal self-consciousness is a necessary condition under which I can distinguish my particular take on things from the way things are independently (...) of my own perspective on them. He elaborates his interpretation and defense of the condition of transcendental self-consciousness by discussing its role in each of the central arguments in the Critique in which the notion importantly figures: the transcendental deduction in both the first edition and in the second, the Analogies of Experience, the Paralogisms, and the second-edition refutation of idealism. (shrink)

Hegel's objection -- Is Kant's idealism subjective? -- An ambiguity in 'subjectivism' -- The epistemological problem -- The transcendental deduction of the categories and subjectivism -- Are Kant's categories subjective? -- Hegel's suspicion : Kantian critique and subjectivism -- What is kantian philosophical criticism? -- Hegel's suspicion : initial formulation -- A shallow suspicion? -- Deepening the suspicion : criticism, autonomy, and subjectivism -- Directions of response -- Critique and suspicion : unmasking the critical philosophy -- Hegel's transformation of critique (...) -- The rejection of Kantian critique : philosophy, skepticism, and the recovery of the ancient idea -- Hegel's epistemology in the shadow of Schelling -- Schulze's skepticism contra the critical philosophy -- Ancient versus modern skepticism : Hegel's difference -- Against the modern conception of rational cognition -- Against modern self-certainty -- The history of skepticism: decline into dogmatism -- Philosophy counter culture and time -- The return to Kantian critique : recognizing the rights of ordinary consciousness -- Two conceptions of philosophical critique -- The return to critique and the relation of philosophy to its history -- The rights of ordinary consciousness and the need for critique -- Critique as the realization of the science of metaphysics -- Hegel's self-transformational criticism -- Presuppositionless philosophy -- The problem of the criterion -- Self-transformational criticism -- The problem of the we' -- Our transformation -- Hegel's alternative model : critical transformation as self-realization. (shrink)

My analysis of political debate in the United Kingdom during the summer of 2016 unpacks the compression of two highly complex issues within an unprecedented moment in British politics: reinvestment in nuclear arms and nuclear energy during the EU referendum crisis. I recover unities and discontinuities across events in this period and throughout history both to examine the non-identity between the particular and the universal as a major trope in parliamentary rhetoric, which construed the universal sentiment of world peace and (...) denied this in terms of security, and to seek out the use of determinate negation, especially when it has bearing on the advancing of climate-related policies. From nuanced speeches in the House of Commons and House of Lords, I move tentatively outwards by gesturing to the moment of truth in reified concepts, seeking to pry them open in their non-identity with art objects of the Anthropocene that are understood within a context of ecological poetics. (shrink)

This article critically examines Christine Korsgaard's claim in her Tanner Lectures to find in self-consciousness itself the norms that would answer our need for practical reasons, insofar as that need is constituted through our capacity for reflection. It shows that the way in which Korsgaard sees “the need for a reason” as arising out of self-consciousness implies a dilemma: on the one hand, we want as the ultimate source of our reasons an authority of which we cannot coherently demand legitimation (...) in turn; on the other, our freedom demands that nothing count for us as a reason except insofar as it is in turn endorsed in reflection. Relying on resources drawn from the tradition of reflection, this paper argues that Korsgaard's attempt to resolve this tension is unsuccessful and appeals, in response to this failure, to faith in the authority of our reasons in the absence of foundational justification of them. (shrink)

On 25 May 1895, Oscar Wilde went to jail after three humiliating trials – the first was Wilde’s failed suit against the Marquess of Queensberry who libelled him for ‘posing as a sodomite’; and the subsequent two involved the Crown’s prosecution of Wilde for committing acts of gross indecency with other men. This article revisits the trials by looking at sources that paint a rather different picture from the influential one that Ed Cohen and Alan Sinfield established in the 1990s. (...) First, it shows that the prosecution persuaded the jury that it was far worse for Wilde to have committed sodomy on two young blackmailers (who also engaged in male prostitution) than the kinds of extortion of which, as they freely admitted, they were culpable. Secondly, the discussion suggests that it is unreasonable to claim that the trials defined the modern identity of the male homosexual. (shrink)

This article takes Afrofuturism as a model for addressing the concerns for digital and technology arts practice in Africa. The focus is on a mechanism for decentralization of a centralized western worldview. Cyberfeminist notions from Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’; propositions for an African Science Fiction; and Bouriaud’s ‘Radicant’ are additionally taken into account to reflect similar mechanism in addressing the mechanisms of decentralization. All these act as speculative methods, which are applied to thinking about the concerns that come with contemporary Globalization. (...) The aim is to rethink these issues in globalisaton, particularly with regard to creative and cultural practice with communication technologies emanating from Africa. (shrink)

"Many of today's moral conflicts concerning family values and medical ethics have their basis in different conceptions of man and the nature and purpose of human life. Fr Bristow argues that contemporary utilitarianism and the various forms of permissive morality are insufficient for dealing with these matters and that only a natural law morality is adequate to the needs and dignity of the human person. He goes on to apply its principles to the issues that derive from advancing technology, (...) such as genetic engineering, in vitrio fertilization, embryo research, drugs and painkillers and ecology."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

From time to time we explain what people do by referring to their habits. We explain somebody’s putting the kettle on in the morning as done through “force of habit”. We explain somebody’s missing a turning by saying that she carried straight on “out of habit”. And we explain somebody’s biting her nails as a manifestation of “a bad habit”. These are all examples of what will be referred to here as habit explanations. Roughly speaking, they explain by referring to (...) a pattern of a particular kind of behaviour which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition. (shrink)

How do legal texts determine legal content? A standard answer to this question—sometimes called “the standard picture”—is that legal texts communicate something and what they communicate is identical to legal content. Mark Greenberg criticizes the standard picture and offers in its place his own “moral impact theory.” My goal here is to respond to Greenberg by showing how the standard picture better explains legal practice than the moral impact theory does. To that end, I first clarify certain aspects of the (...) moral impact theory. I then critique the theory, focusing on its inability to explain (i) why practitioners reason about legal content as they do and (ii) why they agree on legal content as often as they do. Finally, I refine the standard picture and demonstrate how it explains what the moral impact theory cannot. (shrink)

A taped conversational interview with Daniel Dennett and Bill Uzgalis covers a wide range of topics arising from Dennett’s thoughts about computing and human beings. The background of Dennett’s work is explored as are his views about mind-brain identity theory, artificial intelligence, functionalism, human exceptionalism, animal culture, language, pain, freedom and determinism, and quality of life.

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-distributive plural predications (...) of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers. (shrink)

Argues that there is a significant respect in which Kant's categories are to be understood as subjective, namely, in the sense that they are to be understood as the self-legislated rules of our understanding. Argues that the subjectivism of Kant's idealism, by which is meant the relativization of knowledge of objects to our standpoint, is a consequence of the subjectivity of the categories, on this interpretation of their subjectivity. On the reading opposed here, Kant's subjectivism is strictly a consequence of (...) the ideality or subjectivity of our distinctive forms of intuition, space and time. (shrink)

In South African slang ‘Half-Tiger’ refers to five rand, half of a ‘Tiger’ (ten rand) and amounts to approximately 60 US cents. It is at the ‘Half-Tiger’ level of commerce where contemporary and deeply afro-urban digital cultural practice is found. A mass street level culture that in East Africa is driven by the mobile phone as socio-political development tool. And in South Africa by a booming media industry that has been hacked and gone viral. These cultures augment music, fashion, politics (...) and social shifts with a digital aesthetic unique to each city. The article addresses mobile and digital culture in the two cities and compares the effect of mobile technology and its residue in the cultural practices of these very diverse urban environments. I will be addressing the work of key artists and musicians, looking closely at how they respond aesthetically and in a uniquely afro-urban way to a shifting engagement with digital mobile media and networked social practices. (shrink)

Paradoxically, loss is the only unconditional possession possible in elegy. A deep understanding of this phenomenon is to be found in long prose forms and lyricism of contemporary Australian writers. Turning the history of literature – from the Medieval to the contemporary – into a body of work more relevant to our ecological plight, in Kinsella’s corpus genres are consequences of textual events operating within an organic totality. This totality deconstructs the reference point for elegy: loss as the condition of (...) thought and experience. Sidestepping while matrixially reconfiguring traditional and experimental forms of writing, Kinsella’s engagement with genre exemplifies not only the undoing of the codes that constitute all possible readings of a text; it is an implicit critique of speech acts that tend to “fix” life into static nouns, reflecting our culture’s ideology of appropriation of nature. Within a critical counterpoint to appropriation, Australian writing can be read as both urging readers to remain alert to pastoral precedents yet avoid projecting genre onto texts. To some extent, elegy has been decolonised in Australian pastoral. (shrink)

This article constitutes an attempt to articulate productive crossovers between some of the philosophical groundings and theoretical underpinnings on which various schools of phenomenology are based and areas within the practice and theory of psychoanalysis that chime with these. It works ultimately towards establishing a _phenomenologico-existential psychoanalysis _from these researches, out of which key concepts of illness, structure, situation, and periodicity are excavated; and into which they are incorporated.

This article draws out ecological aspects convergent on the first page of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and explores them through Žižek’s theoretical perspectives on humanity today and its relation to the waste and chaos that underpins the state of nature that it is reliant on; that is in relation to the Lacanian category of the Real. It does so in an attempt to bring together Joyce and Žižek so as to demonstrate the theoretical possibilities that can arise out of their (...) synthesis. The essay’s methodology is tripartite, working through a theoretical part – utilising, as well as Žižek’s ecology, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the ecosophical thought of Félix Guattari – a textual part, drawing on Joyce scholarship pertinent to the first section of the Wake, and towards a practical part, which aims to condense the work of the essay and outline a route to a possible praxis, which takes into account the real of nature. (shrink)

Physical objects are such things as stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world we live in. therefore expresses a commonsense commitment to physical realism: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world we live in exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone.

This paper examines discourses of stakeholders regarding global climate change to assess whether and how they construct industrial animal agriculture as posing a risk. The analysis assesses whether these discourses have shifted since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, a report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which indicated that the industrial animal agriculture sector as a whole contributes more to global climate change than the transportation sector. Using Ulrich Beck’s theorizing of the “risk society,” this paper examines (...) how various animal rights and welfare groups, environmental organizations, meat industry stakeholders, governmental agencies, and newspapers in Canada, the United States, and internationally investigate and construct industrial animal agriculture as a risk, if at all, and how their respective discourses conflict. The findings indicate that while some stakeholders acknowledge industrial animal agriculture’s contribution to global climate change, for the most part the problematization of animal agriculture has not increased since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, and the animal agriculture industry has seemingly not lost its power to “rationalize risk.”. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s twentieth volume of poetry is laden with a poetics of attention to time, water and heat. Climate inheres in simplified topographical sketches, surveys and encounters with animals; water is ambiguous: a solid presence that is also fluid, subject to evaporation and often modelled as multi-dimensional motion; universalised western seasons are used rhetorically and symbolically to bring into relief little seasons within seasons, the more spatially and temporally localised markers of change. All these speak directly to the function of (...) the image and terrestrial matter,and how poetry is alert to such conditions. Kinsella has conceived of this as a “clash between linguistic anomaly and environmental exactness.”. (shrink)

Based on fieldwork among Islamic bankers globally, this book questions the equivalence between money and ethnography and asks whether money can ever be adequate to the value backing it. "I enjoyed this book mightily.

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view.

The question how to account for illusion has had a prominent role in shaping theories of perception throughout the history of philosophy. Prevailing philosophical wisdom today has it that phenomena of illusion force us to choose between the following two options. First, reject altogether the early modern empiricist idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience. Instead we must characterize perceptual experience entirely in terms of its (...) representational content. Second, retain the early modern idea that the core subjective character of experience is simply constituted by the identity of its direct objects, but admit that these must be mind-dependent entities, distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. I argue here that the early modern empiricists had an indispensable insight. The idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any such mind-dependent objects. (shrink)

The first truly introductory text on Lyotard, this book situates Lyotard's interventions in the postmodern debate in the wider context of his rethinking of the politics of representation. Bill Readings examines Lyotard's relationship to structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, and contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man; he positions Lyotard's work so as to draw out the implications of poststructurlaism's attention to _difference_ in reading. Lyotard's willingness to question the political and examine the relationship between art (...) and politics is shown to undermine the charge that deconstruction abdicates political and social articulation. (shrink)

Nathan Hanna has recently argued against a position I defend in a 2013 paper in this journal and in my 2016 book on punishment, namely that we can punish someone without intending to harm them. In this discussion note I explain why two alleged counterexamples to my view put forward by Hanna are not in fact counterexamples to any view I hold, produce an example which shows that, if we accept a number of Hanna’s own assumptions, punishment does not require (...) an intention to harm, and discuss whether a definition and counter-example approach is the best way to proceed in the philosophy of punishment. I conclude with a brief exegetical discussion of H.L.A Hart’s Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment. (shrink)

Asks how exactly perceptual experiences do provide reasons for empirical beliefs. My answer is that they furnish the subject with certain essentially experiential demonstrative contents—‘that is thus’ —his grasp of which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. For a person's grasp of such contents, as referring to the mind‐independent objects that they do, and predicating the mind‐independent properties that they do, essentially involves his appreciation of them as the joint upshot of the way things are anyway, (...) in the mind‐independent world around him, and his current point of view upon them and other relevant circumstances of perception. That is to say, he necessarily understands that his current apprehension that things are thus is in part due to the very fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content ashis apprehension of the facts, his epistemic opennessto the way things mind‐independently are out there. (shrink)

Is the God of Calvin a fountain of blessing, or a forceful tyrant? Is Calvin's view of God coercive, leaving no place for the human qua human in redemption? These are perennial questions about Calvin's theology which have been given new life by Gift theologians such as John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Stephen Webb.J. Todd Billings addresses these questions by exploring Calvin's theology of `participation in Christ'. He argues that Calvin's theology of `participation' gives a positive place to the human, (...) such that grace fulfils rather than destroys nature, affirming a differentiated union of God and humanity in creation and redemption. Calvin's trinitarian theology of participation extends to his view of prayer, sacraments, the law, and the ecclesial and civil orders. In light of Calvin's doctrine of participation, Billings reframes the critiques of Calvin in the Gift discussion and opens up new possibilities for contemporary theology, ecumenical theology, and Calvin scholarship as well. (shrink)

In Understanding Moral Obligation, Robert Stern presents an interesting account of the history of ethics from Kant through Hegel and Kierkegaard. I argue that Stern in this account misinterprets Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Works of Love by reading them as presenting a Divine Command Theory of moral obligation, as a philosophical account meant to compete with those of Kant and Hegel. It mistakes, indeed subverts, Kierkegaard's purposes to read him as engaging in a philosophical dialectic in these texts. I (...) argue that Stern's reading renders Kierkegaard's contribution internal to a philosophical dialectic that Kierkegaard means to speak against, from a position expressly and resolutely external to it. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the experiences of EU migrants working in UK restaurants in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. We do so through a care ethics lens, which we bring together with the integrative approach to organisational silence to consider the ethical consequences of the organisational policies of political silence adopted by the restaurant chains in our qualitative empirical study. We develop the concept of political organisational silence and probe its ethical dimensions, showing how at the organisational level (...) it falls short of constituting a practice of caring for migrant workers in politically divisive and hostile times. We argue that organisational policies of political silence emphasise the exploitative nature of the business of (im)migration, which prioritises concern for profits over care for the needs of others. Organisations refuse caring responsibility for migrant workers, leaving care to the migrants themselves and their co-workers and managers. Whilst peer-care practices partially fill this politically silent care-vacuum, this leaves individuals to negotiate difficult tensions without institutional support at a time of increased uncertainty, complexity, hostility, violence, and vulnerability. Drawing lessons from our study and its aftermath, we call for a care manifesto to inform the business of (im)migration, which would need to include caring political responsibility towards migrant workers exercised through caring political organisational voice as well as silence. (shrink)

The authors argue that corporate philanthropy is far too important as a social instrument for good to depend on ethical egoism for its support. They claim that rule utilitarianism provides a more compelling, though not exclusive, moral foundation. The authors cite empirical and legal evidence as additional support for their claim.