How do you keep up in the age of information when there's so much to know and so little time? Here's the ideal solution: a practical book of knowledge offering in-depth analysis, detailed interpretation, and penetrating insight into the key concepts, the most influential minds, and the major intellectual movements in history. A World of Ideas is an essential tool for anyone who wants to be fully informed and stay ahead of the curve in today's world. Now you can get (...) to the bottom of the big bang theory; find out where Freud's ideas were coming from, and where Einstein's may ultimately take us; demystify surrealism and survivalism, nature and nurture, communism and capitalism. With hundreds of in-depth entries, drawn from a wide range of fields--including religion, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, history, art, literature, and science--A World of Ideas enables you to turn immediately to the term in question for a comprehensive description of its history, meaning, and context. - Hundreds of entries, alphabetically arranged, with key words and concepts highlighted and cross-referenced - Reviewed and approved by an academic board of leading scholars - A unique emphasis on multicultural influences and the long-neglected impact of women on the history of ideas - An extensive bibliography of further readings and resources Here are the concepts that shaped civilization . . . the minds that made history . . . the thinkers, the thoughts, and the theories--everything you need to know to fully understand the world we live in. Concise and authoritative, meticulously researched and lucidly written, this invaluable resource is sure to become a standard reference for years to come. (shrink)

This article examines the prospects for an authentic regional architecture in the light of alternative development paradigms. It is argued that the failure of orthodox development strategies and the domination of western culture, including architecture, over non-Western cultures, is due to fundamental imbalances between northern and southern economic structures. By contrast, ecodevelopment, appropriate technology and regional architecture all represent significant devolutionary movements toward a global “eco-culture.” A cultural typology placing eco-culture in historical perspective is outlined. It is concluded that, to (...) be fully effective, changes in development patterns in the south have to be matched by equivalent cultural changes in the North. (shrink)

Concerns of intellectual property infringement in China slow the dissemination of clean technology (Cleantech) innovation that could help bring the pace of global warming under control. We use the U.S. post‐World War 2 policy decisions with respect to Japan and Europe (the Marshall Plan) to show how this problem can be addressed. To help Japan become a western style democracy and stem the tide of communism, the U.S. transferred much of its extant intellectual property to Japan with a promise to (...) open US markets to Japanese goods. The United States did not require Japan to open its markets to U.S. goods. As a result, Japan became a staunch U.S. political ally in Asia, but also a serious economic competitor to the United States. While the Marshall Plan deployed different resources, the political outcomes were similar to Japan: Western Europe was a bulwark against communism. As global warming has become a major strategic issue, we argue that a comparable IPR initiative is required for China. This is not just a matter of doing the right thing as members of global commons, but is also matter of national security. We propose that by facilitating and managing the flow and sharing of U.S., EU, and Japanese Cleantech intellectual property with China—through a Cleantech Marshall Plan—a positive strategic relationship may be built while helping to bring global warming under control. (shrink)

The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical governance models, the promotion of entrepreneurial leadership cultures, and the promotion of a discourse of pursuing educational equity by (...) means of ‘achievement for all’. This paper explores the emergence of a mode of teacher professionalism characteristic of these quasi-autonomous schools, and conceptualises this as being ‘neo-performative’. The neo-performative profession is shaped by the shift in the focus of the regulation and management of schools from ‘governing to governance’, and the consequential rise of the ‘responsibilised profession’, and marked by the emergence of an entrepreneurial model of school leadership. The paper argues that this new conceptualisation of teacher professionalism requires further, more focused, empirical study in order to explore how neoperformative teachers and school leaders articulate their vision of educational equity and social justice, and how they enact this vision in an increasingly intensified high-stakes accountability culture. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the meanings of some natural language expressions should be thought of as functions on their own continuations. Continuations are a well-established analytic tool in the theory of programming language semantics; in brief, a continuation is the entire default future of a computation. I show how a continuation-based grammar can unify several aspects of natural language quantification in a new way: merely stating the truth conditions for quantificational expressions in terms of continuations automatically accounts for scope displacement (...) and scope ambiguity. To prove this claim, I exhibit a simple finite context-free grammar with a strictly compositional semantics in which quantificational NPs are interpreted in situ but take semantic scope over larger constituents. There is no Quantifier Raising (nor any use of a level of Logical Form distinct from overt syntax), no Cooper Storage (or similar mechanisms used in many recent HPSG, Categorial, or Type-logical treatments), and no need for type-shifting (as in Hendriks' Flexible Types account). Continuations also provide a natural account of generalized coordination that does not require either type-shifting or type polymorphism. Compositionality issues are discussed in some detail. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.

The notion that human activity can be characterised in terms of dynamic systems is a well-established alternative to motor schema approaches. Key to a dynamic systems approach is the idea that a system seeks to achieve stable states in the face of perturbation. While such an approach can apply to physical activity, it can be challenging to accept that dynamic systems also describe cognitive activity. In this paper, we argue that creativity, which could be construed as a ‘cognitive’ activity par (...) excellence, arises from the dynamic systems involved in jewellery making. Knowing whether an action has been completed to a ‘good’ standard is a significant issue in considering acts in creative disciplines. When making a piece of jewellery, there a several criteria which can define ‘good’. These are not only the aesthetics of the finished piece but also the impact of earlier actions on subsequent ones. This suggests that the manner in which an action is coordinated is influenced by the criteria by which the product is judged. We see these criteria as indicating states for the system, e.g. in terms of a space of ‘good’ outcomes and a complementary space of ‘bad’ outcomes. The skill of the craftworker is to navigate this space of available states in such a way as to minimise risk, effort and other costs and maximise benefit and quality of the outcome. In terms of postphenomonology, this paper explores Ihde’s human-technology relations and relates these to the concepts developed here. (shrink)

Ethical or ‘socially sustainable’ sourcing mechanisms mandating labour standards among the suppliers and subcontractors that organisations source goods and services from are becoming more common. The issue of how labour activist groups such as trade unions can encourage organisations to adopt and strengthen these mechanisms within domestic production networks is largely unexplored. Using three cases of domestic sustainable sourcing campaigns developed by unions in Britain, the strategies used by labour activists, the characteristics of the organisations targeted and the motivations of (...) lead firms for improving sourcing practices are analysed. The article makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that organisational susceptibility to reputational risk is a key factor influencing the capacity of activist groups to convince and compel their targets to improve sourcing practices. It argues that different types of organisations are susceptible to reputational damage in different ways, that risk events provide opportunities for unions to strengthen their leverage against target organisations, and that the multidimensional nature of corporate reputation needs to be better considered for understanding how campaigns are framed and executed. (shrink)

Law and the Formation of Modern Europe explores processes of legal construction in both the national and supranational domains, and it provides an overview of the modern European legal order. In its supranational focus, it examines the sociological pressures which have given rise to European public law, the national origins of key transnational legal institutions and the elite motivations driving the formation of European law. In its national focus, it addresses legal questions and problems which have assumed importance in parallel (...) fashion in different national societies, and which have shaped European law more indirectly. Examples of this are the post-1914 transformation of classical private law, the rise of corporatism, the legal response to the post-1945 legacy of authoritarianism, the emergence of human rights law and the growth of judicial review. This two-level sociological approach to European law results in unique insights into the dynamics of national and supranational legal formation. (shrink)

What is the communicative value of negative polarity? That is, why do so many languages maintain a stock of special indefinites that occur only in a proper subset of the contexts in which ordinary indefinites can appear? Previous answers include: marking the validity of downward inferences; marking the invalidity of veridical inferences; or triggering strengthening implications. My starting point for exploring a new answer is the fact that an NPI must always take narrow scope with respect to its licensing context. (...) In contrast, ordinary indefinites are notorious for taking wide scope. So whatever other functions NPIs may have, they at least serve as an utterly reliable signal that an indefinite is taking narrow scope. As also proposed in recent work of Kusumoto and Tancredi, I will show that NPIs are only licensed in contexts in which the wide scope construal of an indefinite fails to entail the narrow scope. In other words, weak NPIs occur only in contexts in which taking narrow scope matters for interpretation. Thus one part of the explanation for the ubiquity and robust stability of negative polarity is that it signals scope relations. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT A review of two of the strands of cultural studies that Mark Fenster contends are superior to Murray Edelman’s analysis of mass public opinion—Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and Bourdieu’s sociology—and a more general look at work in the field of cultural studies suggests that all of these alternatives suffer from severe theoretical and methodological limitations. Future studies of culture and politics need to pose questions similar to the ones that preoccupied Edelman, but they must move beyond the political and (...) interpretive biases that have dominated cultural studies (some of which Edelman shared), as well as the questionable view of “ideology” as a matter of elite domination of the masses, rather than as a mediating, constitutive force in the process of individual opinion formation. (shrink)

Most studies of the so-called proportion problem seek to understand how lexical and structural properties of sentences containing adverbial quantifiers give rise to various proportional readings. This paper explores a related but distinct problem: given a use of a particular sentence in context, why do only some of the expected proportional readings seem to be available? That is, why do some sentences allow an asymmetric reading when other, structurally similar sentences seem to require a symmetric reading? Potential factors suggested in (...) the literature include the distribution of donkey pronouns, certain uniqueness implications, and focus structures. I argue here that the use of an adverbial quantifier presupposes HOMOGENEITY: all individual situations that get lumped into a single case for the purposes of evaluating the quantification must agree on whether they satisfy the nuclear scope. For instance, in order for a token of Usually, if a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it to be felicitous when construed under a farmer-dominant asymmetric reading, the context must be consistent with the proposition that each farmer either beats all or none of his donkeys. Thus proportional sentences are indeed systematically ambiguous, but only some readings will be felicitous in a given context. (shrink)

This paper analyzes sluicing as anaphora to an anti-constituent (a continuation), that is, to the semantic remnant of a clause from which a subconstituent has been removed. For instance, in Mary said that [John saw someone yesterday], but she didn’t say who, the antecedent clause is John saw someone yesterday, the subconstituent targeted for removal is someone, and the ellipsis site following who is anaphoric to the scope remnant John saw ___ yesterday. I provide a compositional syntax and semantics on (...) which the relationship between the targeted subconstituent and the rest of the antecedent clause is one of scopability, not movement or binding. This correctly predicts that sluicing should be sensitive to scope islands, but not to syntactic islands. Unlike the currently dominant approaches to sluicing, there is no need to posit syntactic structure internal to the ellipsis site, nor is there any need for a semantic mutual-entailment requirement. Nevertheless, the fragment handles phenomena usually taken to suggest a close syntactic correspondence between the antecedent and the sluice, including case matching, voice matching, and verbal argument structure matching. In addition, the analysis handles phenomena exhibiting antecedent/sluice mismatches, including examples such as John remembers meeting someone, but he doesn’t remember who, , and especially so-called sprouting examples such as John left, but I don’t know when, in which there is no overt subconstituent to target for removal. In Sect. 5, I show how the analysis accounts for Andrews Amalgams such as Sally ate [I don’t know what] today, in which the antecedent surrounds the sluiced clause. Finally, in Sect. 6, I propose a new semantic constraint on sluicing: the Answer Ban, which says that the antecedent clause must not resolve, or even partially resolve, the issue raised by the sluiced interrogative. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Habermasian ideal of deliberation has long been seen as an extension of, and complement to, political action. But Diana Mutz's empirical studies of face-to-face interactions reveal a conflict between political participation and political deliberation: The more likely people are to be exposed to diverse political opinions, the less likely they are to participate, and those who participate most tend to have the least exposure to diverse political opinions. She hypothesizes, however, that the infrastructure of the Internet might allow (...) for the creation of a forum for online political debate that is sufficiently generalizable to result in deliberation. Champions of the Internet's democratic potential similarly praise its diversifying influence on political discussion and the ways in which it lowers barriers to access. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that new technologies have truly transformed political action or produced meaningful deliberation at significant levels. It appears that many of the trends and behaviors Mutz identifies in face-to-face interaction apply to digital interaction as well. (shrink)

Many recent attacks on consequentialism and several defenses of pluralism have relied on arguments for the incommensurability of value. Such arguments have, generally, turned on empirical appeals to aspects of our everyday experience of value conflict. My intention, largely, is to bypass these arguments and turn instead to a discussion of the conceptual apparatus needed to make the claim that values are incommensurable. After delineating what it would mean for values to be incommensurable, I give an a priori argument that (...) such is impossible. It is widely accepted that value is conceptually tied to desire. I argue that, more specifically, it is proportional to merited desire strength. This connection gives one a metric of all value if there is any such thing. This metric entails that value is a complete ordering over all states of affairs, or, in other words, that value is commensurable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002) 1-11 [Access article in PDF] On Ecofeminist Philosophy Chris Cuomo In the heat of a historical moment when the interwoven nature of imperialism, ecological degradation, exploitation of workers, racism, and women's oppression is painfully obvious to many, ecofeminism appears to be gaining in popularity. As Karen Warren's book Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000) illustrates, a key insight of ecological feminism is captured by the (...) phrase "it's all connected." In more precise terms, ecofeminism stresses the depth to which human realities are embedded in ecological realities, and the fact that we are all composed of physical and conceptual connections and relationships. Ecofeminists also make strong normative claims about those connections, and they find present ecological and social relationships to be far more morally troubling than "we" modern thinkers tend to acknowledge.Karen Warren's work has been incredibly influential in the development of ecofeminism, especially as a philosophical perspective. In her 1987 essay "Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections," she argued for a basic ecofeminist position: that feminists ought to pay attention to environmental issues and ecological interdependencies, and that environmentalists ought to attend to the connections among ecological degradation, sexism, and other forms of social oppression. A wealth of ecofeminist poetry, fiction, and political writing had been published in the seventies and early eighties, before "Feminism and Ecology" appeared on the pages of [End Page 1] the journal Environmental Ethics. But Karen Warren was the among the first to use the tools of analytic philosophy to articulate and argue for ecofeminism as a philosophical position, ethical approach, and political movement.In fact, Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) was arguably the first work in contemporary academic philosophy to engage ecofeminism (my first acquaintance with ecofeminist theory was made through a special issue of the feminist magazine Heresies, on feminism and ecology). But Daly's emphasis was on the plight of females in patriarchal social environments. Karen Warren and Australian philosopher Val Plumwood brought full focus to the eco in ecofeminism, applying feminist philosophy (and especially feminist ethics) to our relations with the more than human world, and in turn articulating a broader theory of oppression and liberation. Their analytic approaches resulted in philosophy that synthesizes as it clarifies, taking seriously the value of nature, the history of philosophy, the power of culture, and the insights of good science.In Ecofeminist Philosophy Karen Warren presents ecofeminism as a general school of thought, though she also argues for a particular set of ecofeminist principles, values, methodologies, and practices. In terms of both her method and her conclusions, it is important to note that her emphasis on clearly articulated principles is by no means a defense of an absolutist or falsely universalizing ethic. Rather, Warren's ecofeminist philosophy emerges from her reading of a wide and diverse array of theoretical and political examples. Like Noël Sturgeon's Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (1997), which focuses on feminist ecological movements, Warren's project is to look for and describe the family resemblances among diverse examples of ecofeminism. This approach allows her to articulate epistemic, moral, and political positions that are pluralist, yet do not avoid making bold truth-claims. For example, Warren argues that "something is a feminist issue if an understanding of it helps one understand the oppression, subordination, or domination of women" (Warren 2000, 1).In a sense such a definition is wide open, taking various approaches and issues to be worthy of feminist attention. At the same time, it certainly does not allow just any perspective to count as feminist. Throughout Ecofeminist Philosophy, Warren defends multicultural ethics while clearly advocating specific transcultural values, such as justice and caring: [End Page 2] If we dare to care, if we dare to enter into community with others through an honest recognition of our commonalities and differences, we will be poised to create generally respectful, nonviolent, care-based, intentional communities where commonalities and differences are just that... Such intentional communities are a creative alternative to violence-prone communities where order is imposed from outside through unjustified... (shrink)

We explore the science of mass extinction, link it to industrial civilization, use the concept of the banality of evil to explain the ethical situation, and then explain the various ways in which mass extinction poses further ethical problems within that situation, especially of environmental justice and the loss of value. Overall, humankind risks a profound failure of autonomy, perhaps our greatest achievement. For those who want to take action, we recommend the project of anthroponomy and large-unit/deep-branching conservation.

As the global prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease increases, the need to understand family caregiving becomes increasingly pressing. I argue that there is an under-recognized form of caregiving for people with early to mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease. This type of caregiving involves, roughly, helping people reason through their values. It arises along with the loss of the capacity for executive functioning. Moreover, it is prone to give rise to moral distress, which is an under-recognized vulnerability in family caregiving. Categories of family caregiving (...) thus need to be expanded, and moral distress needs to be recognized not only in the context of nursing. (shrink)

A letter to the editor from Françoise Baylis and Chris Kaposy concerning the recent commentary by Toby Schonfeld and colleagues , which was written in response to Baylis and Kaposy’s article.

Judgments of character traits tend to be overcorrelated, a bias known as the halo effect. We conducted two studies to test an explanation of the effect based on shared lexical context and connotation. Study 1 tested whether the context similarity of trait names could explain 39 participants’ ratings of the probability that two traits would co-occur. Over 126 trait pairs, cosine similarity between the word2vec vectors of the two words was a reliable predictor of the human judgments of trait co-occurrence (...) probability (cross-validated r2 =.19, p <.001). Two measures related to word similarity increased the variation accounted for in the human judgments to 45%, cross-validated (p <.001). In Experiment 2, 40 different participants judged similarity of word meaning within the pairs, confirming that the word pairs were not simply synonymous (Average [SD] = 40.8/100 [13.1/100]). Shared lexical context and word connotation play a role in shaping the halo effect. (shrink)

The central focus of this article is to share several experiential activities we have designed in our teaching careers that we use to help education students, primarily undergraduates and teacher candidates, access philosophical ideas and enter philosophical discussions. The examples shared below come from our attempts to help students reach key concepts and abstract ideas in some well-known educational philosophical discussions, through engaging in experiences relating to them. They are based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, John Dewey’s scientific method, (...) and Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. The focus for this article is not so much on the specific content or philosophical interpretation of these works but instead on the activities themselves as a means towards better understanding the concept of experiential learning itself. The three examples we present serve to show ways in which well-designed and thoroughly-considered experiences can serve as a bridge to difficult and abstract material while also honoring a more expansive range of learning styles. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the concept of biopiracy, which initially emerged to challenge various aspects of the regime for intellectual property rights in living organisms, as well as related aspects pertaining to the ownership and apportioning of benefits from ‘genetic resources’ derived from the world’s biodiversity.This paper proposes that we take the allegation of biopiracy seriously due to the impact it has as an intervention which indexes a number of different, yet interrelated, problematizations of biodiversity, biotechnology and IPR. Using the neem (...) tree case as an example, it describes activists’ use of the term as one that involves a deliberate simplification of science and IPR. Additionally, it argues that in so doing, biopiracy is positioned as a touchstone that mobilizes actors and problems, and ultimately generates ‘solutions’ to the very challenges it creates.The paper will also encourage a view of biopiracy claims that does not always treat them simply as claims of theft, or as a misallocation of benefits, but rather as claims that are designed to raise broader questions about the IPR system itself. It concludes by advocating that, in order to properly understand how to address biopiracy, we must be prepared to move beyond the current narrow readings to develop a more complete picture of the term’s influence in challenging how, and by whom, the decisions about what is natural and what is invented come to be made. (shrink)

Many of the foremost defenders of distributive egalitarianism hold that its scope should be limited to co-citizens. But this bracketing of distributive equality exclusively to citizens turns out to be very difficult to defend. Pressure is placed on it, for instance, when we recognize its vulnerability to ?extension arguments? which attempt to cast the net of egalitarian concern more widely. The paper rehearses those arguments and also examines some ? ultimately unsuccessful ? responses which ?citizenship egalitarians? might make. If it (...) does turn out that citizenship egalitarianism cannot be defended, then two options are open to its adherents: to modify that position substantially in order to embrace at least some global egalitarian components, or to argue for a reorganization of citizenship regimes in such a way that citizenship might properly track the subjects of egalitarian justice. Both are radical options. Finally, the paper then briefly considers one way in which an attenuated form of citizenship egalitarianism might still be defended. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is comprised of two broad projects, the negative project and the positive project, each of which is a response to a kind of armchair use of intuitions. I examine two examples of the negative project-the analysis of knowledge and the theory of reference-and two examples of the positive project-free will and intentional action-and review criticisms of each example. I show how the criticisms can be met and argue that even if they could not have been met, experimental philosophy (...) raises important questions about methodology, opening the door on new questions and new ways of looking at old questions. For that reason, experimental philosophy as a movement is robust and full of potential. (shrink)

Successor views in the free will literature are views that reject the assumption behind the compatibility question, the question of whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Specifically, they challenge the assumption that the compatibility question must be answered with either a yes or a no. One premise typically found in arguments for successor views is the premise that there are certain challenging cases where we have compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions within the same case. This paper gives empirical support (...) for that premise by presenting an experiment that yields an actor-observer asymmetry in intuitions about the compatibility questions. Given causal determinism, intuitions are incompatibilist when we think about someone else doing an action, but intuitions are compatibilist when we think about our own action as judged by someone else. (shrink)

This book is an excellent and accessible overview of the position that children learn the meanings of words by applying a variety of nonlinguistic cognitive tools to the problem. We take issue with Bloom's emphasis on Theory of Mind as an explanatory mechanism for language learning; and with his claim that only unitary objects are nameable.

Whatever else language may be, it is complex and multifaceted. Shanker & King (S&K) have tried to contrast a dynamic interactive view of language with an information processing view. I take issue with two main claims: first, that the dynamic interactive view of language is a “new paradigm” in either animal research or human language studies; and second, that the dynamic systems language-as-dance view of language is in any way incompatible with an information-processing view of language. That some information is (...) defined in coregulated social interaction guarantees the dancing. That all information is composed of relevant differences guarantees the information processing. (shrink)

Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) describe the role of genetic evolution in linguistic category sharing among a population of agents. We consider their methodology and conclude that, although it is plausible that genetic evolution is sufficient for such tasks, there is a bias in the presented work for such a conclusion to be reached. We suggest ways to eliminate this bias and make the model more convincingly relevant to the cognitive sciences.

This essay replies to the various criticisms made of Framing the Early Middle Ages. It concedes a number of points relating to the importance of ideologies, the distinction between élites and aristocracies, the issue of money, and the question of the importance of the productive forces. It defends the comparative method and defends the discussions of coloni and of the spatial limitations of the peasant-mode of production in Framing. It also explores the nature of the state and aristocracy in this (...) period. (shrink)

In the ongoing debate about the impact that studies of public ignorance should have on the study of culture, Mark Fenster and Bret Chandler assume that wider political participation must be our goal, because, to them, political ignorance is a culturally imposed, and therefore removable, obstacle—as if, without the baleful influence of culture, political participants would be well informed. Culture is indeed a primary influence on people's political opinions, so political scientists should indeed study the role it plays in the (...) formation of political beliefs. But such studies should begin with ignorance as people's default position, and should refrain from assuming that the source of ignorance is cultural domination or manipulation. (shrink)

The biodiversity crisis should be a key issue within debates on global justice – but to date it has not been. This article aims to provide a stimulus to further engagement. First, it provides a brief introduction to the notion of a biodiversity crisis, and to its origins. Second, it distinguishes our various reasons for caring about the crisis. Third, it shows why the biodiversity crisis raises important – albeit hitherto neglected – issues of global justice. Fourth, it sketches some (...) of the most important questions scholars of global justice should be in a position to engage with, in order to move the debate forwards and help ensure that collective political responses to the crisis are just ones. (shrink)