In many democracies, voter turnout is low and getting lower. If the people choose not to govern themselves, should they be forced to do so? For Jason Brennan, compulsory voting is unjust and a petty violation of citizens' liberty. The median non-voter is less informed and rational, as well as more biased, than the median voter. According to Lisa Hill, compulsory voting is a reasonable imposition on personal liberty. Hill points to the discernible benefits of compulsory voting (...) and argues that high turnout elections are more democratically legitimate. The authors - both well-known for their work on voting and civic engagement - debate questions such as: • Do citizens have a duty to vote, and is it an enforceable duty? • Does compulsory voting violate citizens' liberty? If so, is this sufficient grounds to oppose it? Or is it a justifiable violation? Might it instead promote liberty on the whole? • Is low turnout a problem or a blessing? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Laws, & Gods: Magistrates & Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican RomeT. Corey BrennanGargola, D. J. Lands, Laws, & Gods: Magistrates & Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. x 1 270 pp. Cloth, $43.95. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome)“Nothing could have contributed more to the safety, strength and profit (...) of the state.” Thus Niccolò Machiavelli (Disc. II 6), one of the first of a long line of moderns to expatiate on the phenomenon of Roman Republican colonization. The latest (at time of writing) is D. J. G[argola], with his learned Lands, Laws, & Gods, which has its origins in the author’s 1989 University of North Carolina dissertation. The book takes as its general subject not just Republican colonization but also another well-trod area of Roman public policy—the agrarian legislation that distributed state land and regulated its use—as well as the religious and technical aspects of Roman land definition.Can we really expect much new on these traditional topics? Perhaps not, [End Page 143] especially now that we have Dieter Flach’s Römische Agrargeschichte (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 3.9, Munich 1990)—a masterly synthesis that G. oddly has missed. Yet G. independently manages to come up with a work of value. The bulk of G.’s book (chapters 2–7) consists of detailed reconstructions, especially from the evidence of Livy 21–45 (not much used by Flach), of how colonies were established, viritane plots assigned, and land sold or leased in the mid-Republic. Here G. has sifted through a small mountain of difficult evidence (and bibliography) of widely varying worth and succeeded in shaping a coherent narrative. He has a keen eye for technical and conventional language, and sound judgment on the limits of applying evidence from the various Gromatici (none of whom were writing much before the second century a.d.) to the Republican situation. In short, G. in these pages has crafted a reliable and readable English language work of reference on all sorts of res agrariae.The emphasis in chapters 2–7 is not so much on evolution in the administration of agrarian and colonial legislation—G. argues (somewhat provocatively) that there was not much development of institutions within this period—but on creating a composite picture of how things worked. G. realizes “the result is necessarily an idealized portrait,” in which the system appears more regular than it perhaps was (10–11). One additional trouble, however, is that this approach sometimes flattens potentially significant details. Take for instance the two commissions of colonial IIIviri created under a lex Aelia of late 194 (Liv. 34.53.1–2), one of which went on to found Copia (193), the other Valentia (192). Now, the reported terms of this law provided that the commissioners hold imperium—quite striking, though G. misses that detail—for three years (i.e., 193–91) to colonize the ‘ager Thurinus’ and the ‘Bruttii’ respectively. G. is over-optimistic in calling these territories “stable, long pacified regions” (63). If so, why the imperium? One possible explanation. The territorial parameters placed on each of these commissions (especially ‘the Bruttii’) were quite loose. Those IIIviri may have been expected to take wide-ranging measures to strengthen Roman control over dissidents in this area (cf. App. Hann. 61.252–53), even after they established their colonies. (Note that each of these commissions completed their ostensible tasks before their triennium expired.) If true, how many other colonial commissions were like these?It is only in chapters 8 and 9, where G. surveys agrarian programs from the Gracchi to the end of the Republic, that we see an attempt to show real development. The Gracchi in their agrarian legislation sought to achieve broader effects than any of their predecessors, argues G. in chapter 8, and so introduced agrarian laws that “ended the rigid separation of categories found in mid-Republican legislation” (176). Consider the lex Sempronia agraria of 133, which, in its final form, established IIIviri a(gris) i(udicandis) a(dsignandis) to settle coloni on public land taken from illegal possessores. In this law... (shrink)

Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness (2018) and (2020) argue that adjuncts are not exploited. We are sympathetic to some of their points. We agree, for example, that certain ways in which adjuncts are compared to sweatshop workers are offensive. For, as Brennan and Magness point out, there are many respects in which adjuncts are much better off than sweatshop workers. However, we show that the core insights of their paper are compatible with the view that adjuncts are exploited. (...) Furthermore, their more general views about exploitation expressed in Cracks in the Ivory Tower actually lend support to the claim that adjuncts are exploited. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill is the father of modern liberalism. His most remembered work, On Liberty, which was published in 1859, changed the course of the liberal tradition. What is less well-known is that his ideas have profoundly influenced the American constitutional rights tradition of the latter half of the twentieth century. Mill's 'harm principle' inspired the constitutional right to privacy recognized in Griswold v Connecticut, Roe vs Wade and other cases. His defense of freedom of expression influenced Justices Holmes, Brandeis, (...) Douglas, Brennan and others and led to greatly expanded freedom of speech in the twentieth century. Finally, Mill was an ardent feminist whose last important work, The Subjection of Women, was a full-scale and, for its time, radical defense of complete gender equality. This is a book for lawyers who want to understand the intellectual origins of modern constitutional rights, and for political philosophers interested in the constitutional implications of Mill's conception of freedom. (shrink)

There is an important family of semantic notions that we apply to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts - as when we say that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Thought and World presents a theory of the content of such notions. The theory is largely deflationary in spirit, in the sense that it represents a broad range of semantic notions - including the concept of truth - as being entirely free from substantive metaphysical and (...) empirical presuppositions. At the same time, however, it takes seriously and seeks to explain the intuition that there is a metaphysically or empirically 'deep' relation linking thoughts to reality. Thus, the theory represents a kind of compromise between deflationism and versions of the correspondence theory of truth. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of logic and language. (shrink)

Many philosophers, psychologists, and medical practitioners believe that killing is no worse than letting die on the basis of James Rachels's Bare-Difference Argument. I show that his argument is unsound. In particular, a premise of the argument is that his examples are as similar as is consistent with one being a case of killing and the other being a case of letting die. However, the subject who lets die has both the ability to kill and the ability to let die (...) while the subject who kills lacks the ability to let die. Modifying the latter example so that the killer has both abilities yields a pair of cases with morally different acts. The hypothesis that killing is worse than letting die is the best explanation of this difference. (shrink)

With the progress of science we become more and more aware of the undiscovered, and of our feebleness to visualize or express what is dimly known to us. Geologists estimate that man evolved some 1,000,000 years ago on an earth which astronomers say is some 2,000,000,000 years old. Caution is required in accepting such figures, for we must remember how far out Lord Kelvin was in estimating the age of the earth—before the discovery of radium. Man has been civilized for (...) some 5,000 years, and Galileo, with his telescope and revolutionary ideas, lived some 300 years ago. There may be, we are told, a million million years before the sun grows weak and the earth becomes farther from the sun so that all life freezes. Long before this man may use up the metals available for his machines, and those ready sources of energy now so wastefully used, by which he at present multiplies and swarms in cities. In such case he will return through birth control or famine, or both, to a simple, uncrowded, pastoral existence. There is little likelihood of his being able to use atomic energy, other than that which reaches the earth as sun radiation and is available directly or as energy stored in water-power, wood, coal, and oil. (shrink)

Objectives: To explore how subjects in a placebo-controlled vitamin A supplementation trial among Ghanaian women aged 15–45 years perceive the trial and whether they know that not all trial capsules are the same, and to identify factors associated with this knowledge.Methods: 60 semistructured interviews and 12 focus groups were conducted to explore subjects’ perceptions of the trial. Steps were taken to address areas of low comprehension, including retraining fieldworkers. 1971 trial subjects were randomly selected for a survey measuring their knowledge (...) that not all trial capsules are the same. The subjects’ fieldworkers were also interviewed about their characteristics and trial knowledge. Factors associated with knowledge were explored using multi-level modeling.Results: Although subjects knew they were taking part in research, most thought they were receiving an active and beneficial medication. Variables associated with knowledge were education and district of residence. Radio broadcasts benefited those with some schooling. Fieldworkers’ characteristics were not associated with subjects’ knowledge.Conclusions: Research and debate on new or improved consent procedures are urgently required, particularly for subjects with little education. (shrink)

Theological schools are well situated to create intentional cultures for the purpose of spiritual formation. Indeed, most schools of theology have this goal as an essential part of their mission as well as a requirement for continued accreditation. And yet, the measurement of spiritual formation over time is fraught with challenges. This article seeks to address some of these challenges by means of developing a meta-theory of positive change/growth which would eventually serve as a theoretical basis for the development of (...) a generalizable and reliable measurement tool. (shrink)

Schellenberg's book The unity of perception is full of innovative ideas and challenges to preconceptions. This discussion endorses several of Schellenberg's main contentions, but it also challenges her handling of several key topics, such as hallucinations and perceptual awareness of particulars, and it expresses doubts about the informativeness of her main analytic tool, the notion of a perceptual capacity.

The computational genomics community has come increasingly to rely on the methodology of creating annotations of scientific literature using terms from controlled structured vocabularies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). We here address the question of what such annotations signify and of how they are created by working biologists. Our goal is to promote a better understanding of how the results of experiments are captured in annotations in the hope that this will lead to better representations of biological reality through (...) both the annotation process and ontology development, and in more informed use of the GO resources by experimental scientists. (shrink)

I have taken a Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation. My thesis is that by perpetuating derogatory myths about womankind, for the sake of financial gain, the pornography industry treats the class of women as a means only, and not as composed of individuals who are ends in themselves. It thus de-grades all women, as members of this class, imputing to them less than full human status.

Agrifood scholars commonly adopt “a matter of fact way of speaking” to talk about the extent of neoliberal rollout in the food sector and the viability of “alternatives” to capitalist food initiatives. Over the past few decades this matter of fact stance has resulted in heated debate in agrifood scholarship on two distinct battlegrounds namely, the corporate food regime and the alternative food regime. In this paper I identify some of the limitations of speaking in a matter of fact way (...) and of focusing on capitalist and neoliberal economies as the yardstick by which to assess all food economy initiatives. Using stories of bananas in Australia and the Philippines I advocate for a new mode of critical inquiry in food scholarship that focuses on matters of concern. Following Bruno Latour I use the term critical inquiry to refer to research methods and thinking practices that multiply possible ways of being and acting in the world. The new mode of critical inquiry I propose centers on enacting three broad research matters of concern. These are gathering and assembling economic diversity human actancy and nonhuman actancy. I argue that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This essay, responding to recent work of David Cummiskey and Barcia Baron, defends the thesis that imperfect duty of beneficence in Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals is a rather minimal, indeterminate requirement but must be supplemented by judgement guided by the values expressed in Kant's formulas of the Categorical Imperative. So understood, Kant's ethics is neither as permissive nor as inflexibly demanding as various commentators have thought. Although Kant does not acknowledge supererogation as a moral category, arguably his position implies (...) that some acts are meritorious and more than required. (shrink)

The oblivion of the interval -- Being in place -- The aporia between envelope and things -- Dualism in Bergson -- Interval, sexual difference -- Beyond man: rethinking life and matter -- Conclusion: interval as relation, interval as becoming.

Cognitive deficits are part of the normal aging process and are exacerbated by various diseases that affect adults in old age, such as dementia, depression, and stroke. A significant scientific and social effort has been expended to evaluate whether cognitive deficits can be remedied through systematic interventions. The editors, as well as the chapter authors, represent a variety of viewpoints that span theory as well as practice. Overall, they aim to address concepts in cognitive rehabilitation that are useful in intervention (...) research -- research which examines problems and issues in normal and pathological aging -- and focusing on the application of cognitive training strategies in natural settings. Thus, the book is grounded in contemporary theory in cognitive aging and is applicable to both the practicing clinician as well as the researcher. It is organized into four sections. The first highlights prominent theoretical principles; the second looks at cognitive rehabilitation strategies in normal aging; the third examines the interplay between lifestyle patterns and cognitive function through applying a broad definition of lifestyle choices; and the fourth focuses on rehabilitation strategies that address issues in pathological aging. (shrink)

Argues that despite claims of self-styled 'postmodernists of resistance', postmodernism provides neither a viable educational politics nor a foundation for effective radical educational practice. In place of postmodernism, the bookoutlines a 'politics of human resistance' which puts the challenge to capitalism and its attendant inequalities firmly on the agenda of educational theory, politics and practice.

This introduction argues for the importance of Suárez’s philosophy for historians of medieval philosophy as well as historians of early modern philosophy. It also provides synopses of each of the essays in the volume and a brief biography of Suárez, placing his life and works into some historical context.

Causal powers are returning to the forefront of realist philosophy of science to fill explanatory gaps seen to be left by reductivist and eliminativist accounts of previous generations. This volume revisits the fortunes of causal powers as scientific explanatory principles across history to foster deeper discussions about their metaphysical natures.

Elegance in software is widely recognized by professionals, but not well articulated. Program elegance rests on not only efficiency, as widely acknowledged, but other features that reflect the notion in other creative endeavors where artifacts are built under constraints, such as architecture. We suggest a compendium of minimality, accomplishment, modesty, and revelation, discussion of which reveals some subtleties. Programming experience enhances appreciation of these features, especially the last. Together, they can viewed as a program’s degree of “fit” to the task, (...) raising other questions in common with any problem of the philosophy of aesthetics. (shrink)

One hundred years ago Gottlob Frege published a damaging, abusive review of Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic. Although rather a lot has now been written abound Frege’s review and the role it might have played in the development of Husserl’s thought, much still remains to be rectified regarding Frege’s assessment of the book and the credence his review has been accorded. Philosophers have generally been all too willing to trust Frege’s judgment, and so all too ready to dismiss Husserl’s book (...) as irredeemably muddled. (shrink)

Irigaray's critique of the phallocentric subject's implicit dependence on the maternal-feminine “outside” is compelling. Her postulation of nonhierarchical sexual difference gives the relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject's worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject's sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend Irigaray (...) and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus. Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray's conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll's thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray's concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson. (shrink)

The survival of a unique set of drawings, complemented by a contemporary description and a sale catalogue, enable us to ‘reconstruct’ the cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson , a miscellaneous collection formed in Paris c. 1740. A brief assessment is offered of the status of such cabinets in the growth and diffusion of science in ancien régime France. We also point to a link with the decorative arts: in a study of such a subject the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions (...) must be treated as a unity if we are fully to evoke the context of the cabinet in the age of the rococo. Only the modern ‘discipline’-oriented viewpoint forces a separation between the history of science and the history of art. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Special Value of a Good Will and Acts from Duty Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives The Universal Law Formulas The Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself Autonomy and the Kingdom of Ends Deriving the Supreme Moral Principle from Common Moral Ideas Why Kant Needs the Second‐Person Perspective Kant on Law and Justice Kant on Punishment Kant's Vision of a Just World Order Beneficence and Other Duties of Love Duties to Oneself and Duties of (...) Respect to Others The Enduring Value of Kant's Ethics. (shrink)

Hugely impressive in its scope, with introductory chapters on social history, the film industry and theories of realism, this indispensable history of these vital years contains unusually fresh discussions of films justly regards as important, alongside those unjustly ignored. The extensive filmography which accompanies Sex, Class and Realism will also prove to be an invaluable reference source in the teaching of British cinema history.

In ethics, ‘probabilism’ refers to a position defended by a number of Catholic theologians, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They held that, when one is uncertain which of a range of actions is the right one to perform, it is permissible to perform any which has a good chance of being the right one—even if there is another which has a better chance. This paper considers the value of this position from the viewpoint of modern ethical philosophy. The (...) unusual nature of probabilism as a theory focusing upon permissibility, rather than right-making properties, is explored and related to some modern attempts to set out ‘satisficing’ and ‘hybrid’ ethical theories. Such theories try to distinguish between what is best and what is permissible, and probabilism can be understood as an alternative way of supplementing a theory of right-making properties by adding to it a theory of permissibility. But a more radical version is also possible, where one abandons any attempt to identify right actions or right-making properties, and instead considers permissibility alone. Accordingly, a ‘multi-account theory’ of permissibility is proposed and defended as a model of how many people actually make moral decisions. (shrink)

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of “making socialists” was undermined by August Weismann’s attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov’s research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov’s interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, (...) and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov’s work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research – especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency. (shrink)

This article advocates for the inclusion of theistic beliefs in the study of humility and intellectual humility and recommends the construct of worldview as a promising resource for this endeavor. The promise of this approach is tested by exploring the contrasting worldviews of three religious traditions: Buddhism, Christianity, and atheism. In so doing, the ontological and anthropological turn of these worldviews will be contrasted with implications for research on humility drawn.

This article examines the critique of materialism in the work of Noam Chomsky which treats the doctrine as lacking in any clear content. It is argued that Chomsky’s critique is a coherent one drawing on an understanding of the Newtonian revolution in science, on a modular conception of the mind, and on the related conception of epistemic boundedness. The article also seeks to demonstrate the limits of Chomsky’s position by drawing attention to his use of the third-person point of view (...) in considering the mental and his resulting failure to make good sense of consciousness. Finally, a dual-aspect theory is recommended which would incorporate Chomsky’s agnosticism about the nature of matter. (shrink)

Stewart Duncan, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022, 248pp., ISBN: 9780197613009.