In a recent paper published in this journal, Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu argue that we have given insufficient weight to the moral importance of fairness in our account of the best policies for non-medical exemptions to childhood immunization requirements. They advocate for a type of policy they call Contribution, according to which parents must contribute to important public health goods before their children can receive NMEs to immunization requirements. In this response, we argue that Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu give insufficient (...) weight to the moral importance parental liberty in ways that count against their preferred type of NMEs policy and threaten public support for mandatory vaccination laws and public health initiatives generally. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and has become an area of growing focus in Business & Society. Looking back and reviewing climate change discussion within this journal highlights the importance of time and space in addressing the climate crisis. Looking forward, we extend existing research by theorizing and politicizing the co-implication of time and space through the concept of “space-time.” To illustrate this, we employ the logical structure of “the trace” to advance business and (...) society scholarship on climate change by shifting the focus to a place-bound emphasis on climate impacts and directing scholarship toward climate change’s temporal markers and material effects. By operationalizing “the trace,” we contribute to Business & Society debates in three ways: reimagining complex stakeholder relations, advancing a performative understanding of climate risk, and foregrounding planetary systems and the physical environment. (shrink)

The craftworker is considered to be an exemplar of attention to quality, service to the public, personal satisfaction and the embodiment of tradition. The teacher as craftworker can safely be seen as one of the three archetypes of the teacher described briefly in Chapter 4. Furthermore, it is perhaps the default conception of the teacher in recent philosophical treatments of the nature of teacher's work. This conception is examined and criticised.

Žižek’s recent commentaries on the topics of gender identity, sexuality, and consent have provoked outraged reactions from the politically correct neoliberal consensus. This paper argues these reactions emerge in part due to Žižek & Zupančič’s recent explorations into the ontological and political ramifications of Lacan’s thesis ‘ il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel’. Specifically, these explorations pose a threat to the contemporary definition of the subject as the subject of trauma, and the economy of moralistic outrage which sustains this (...) subjectivization. Following the recent commentaries by both Žižek and Zupančič, we argue this economy produces a valorization of affects, in which subjectivity becomes directly expressed in proportion to the subject’s expressed suffering. We argue the properly feminist question today must be how to escape what has become an economy of moralist satisfaction; an economy that seduces the subject into a cycle in which their own suffering becomes a currency – an end in itself – rather than a strategy to overcome the social inequalities that created the conditions for this very exploitation. This paper aims at offering an explanation of the traumatic reactions against Žižek and Zupančič’s recent investigations into sexuality, as well as to continue their investigation in the direction of trauma and subjectivity itself. (shrink)

Michel Galley, Pi-Chuan Chang, Daniel Cer, Jenny R. Finkel, and Christopher D. Manning Computer Science and Linguistics Departments Stanford University..

In multi-armed bandit problems, information acquired from experimentation is valuable because it tells the agent whether to select a particular option again in the future. This article tests whether people undervalue this information because they are ambiguity averse, or have a distaste for uncertainty about the average quality of each alternative. It is shown that ambiguity averse agents have lower than optimal Gittins indexes, appearing to undervalue information from experimentation, but are willing to pay more than ambiguity neutral agents to (...) learn the true mean of the payoff distribution, appearing to overvalue objectively given information. This prediction is tested with a laboratory experiment that elicits a Gittins index and a willingness to pay on six two-armed bandits. Consistent with the predictions of ambiguity aversion, the Gittins indexes are significantly lower than optimal and willingnesses to pay are significantly higher than optimal. (shrink)

We investigate expansions of Heyting algebras in possession of a unary term describing the filters that correspond to congruences. Hasimoto proved that Heyting algebras equipped with finitely many normal operators have such a term, generalising a standard construction on finite-type boolean algebras with operators. We utilise Hasimoto’s technique, extending the existence condition to a larger class of EHAs and some classes of double-Heyting algebras. Such a term allows us to characterise varieties with equationally definable principal congruences using a single equation. (...) Moreover, in the presence of a dual pseudocomplement operation, discriminator varieties are characterised by a pair of equations. We also prove that a variety of dually pseudocomplemented EHAs with a normal filter term is semisimple if and only if it is a discriminator variety. This generalises two known results, one by Kowalski and Kracht for finite-type varieties of BAOs, and the other by the present author for dually pseudocomplemented Heyting algebras without additional operations. (shrink)

Between 1906 and 1909 the biologist Ronald Ross and the classicist W.H.S. Jones pioneered interdisciplinary research in biology and history in advancing the claim that malaria had been crucial in the decline of golden-age Greece. The idea had originated with Ross, winner of the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the importance of mosquitoes in the spread of the disease. Jones assembled what, today, we would call an interdisciplinary network of collaborators in the sciences and humanities. But early negative reviews of Jones’s (...) Malaria and Greek History by classicists and historians ended the project, despite a positive reception among malariologists. Today, the “Jones hypothesis” is often used to exemplify the naïvete of past scholarship, and few examine Jones’s evidence and reasoning. In this age of renewed interdisciplinarity, a review of what went wrong is timely. Jones and Ross knew they were opening new methodological territory and struggled with the challenges of multiple ways of knowing. Over 100 years later, malaria remains an important site of historical-biological research, yet integration is elusive. After reviewing the Jones-Ross relationship, Jones’s interdisciplinary campaign, and the reception of the hypothesis among classicists/ancient historians and in malariology, we conclude by highlighting some of the specific challenges faced by those exploring the interface of biology and history. (shrink)

Why has thinking about politics over the centuries been quite so intertwined with thinking about educational theory and practice? This book draws together a fascinating mix of educational pioneers and thinkers to answer this question and more.

Democracy is “an attractively anarchic and colourful regime, it seems, one that accords a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike”. The present essay raises three questions in particular. What precisely is the criticism of democracy here? What kind or kinds of equality and inequality matter for Plato? As all sides agree, he is interested in proportional equality more than he is in its arithmetical counterpart, so that true equality, for him, will always turn out to be a kind (...) of inequality. But inequality in what? Plato undoubtedly thinks the good and wise deserve a greater share in power just because they are good and wise; does he also think, as some have claimed, that the wealthy also deserve a greater share just because they are wealthy? The answer proposed to this last question in the following essay is a clear no: even if Plato holds wealth to be a good of some sort, the possession of an unequal share of it—despite what may be suggested, prima facie, by the presence of property classes in the Laws—is not, and is not even a part of, the reason for giving the wealthy an unequal share of power. The final proposal offered by this essay is that if goodness and wisdom are indeed for Plato the only good actually relevant to the distribution of power, and if—as he seems to hold—true goodness and wisdom belong only to gods, then there will be a case for saying that, even for Plato, the supposed arch-enemy of democracy, democracy turns out to be the only possible outcome, whether under non-ideal or under ideal conditions. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Jeffrie Murphy for his response to my article1 and to Jonathan Jacobs for the chance to respond in turn to Murphy’s criticisms. It is a particular honor for me to respond to J...

_ Midlife: A Philosophical Guide _, by SetiyaKieran. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 186.

: T.L. Short's book argues that Peirce's early theory of signs was flawed, and that the development of his mature theories required a new start and the rejection of some fundamental doctrines from the earlier view. While agreeing that Peirce's view of signs changed and agreeing on the new developments that were of most significance, I express some doubts about Short's diagnosis of why such changes were required. I argue that the changes were required, not by internal inconsistencies in the (...) earlier position, but rather by the need to come up with an adequate account of the role of experience in cognition. (shrink)

Taking into consideration analytical, continental, historical, post-modern and contemporary thinkers, Insole provides a powerful defence of a realist construal of religious discourse. Insole argues that anti-realism tends towards absolutism and hubris. Cutting through the tired and well-rehearsed debates in this area, Insole provides a fresh perspective on approaches influenced by Wittgenstein, Kant, and apophatic theology. The defence of realism offered is unusual in being both analytically precise, and theologically sensitive, with a view to some of the wider cultural, ethical and (...) political implications of the debate. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to determine the nature of the artwork and the scope of the world revealed therein. the artwork is that by which art becomes actual. it is that in which art is expressed. however, it is more than an object of aesthetic experience. it is the revelation of a people's world. here the world means the world of a particular people at a particular time, the cultural and "intellectual atmosphere" of a historical people. a people's (...) world is their being, therefore, artwork is an epochal manifestation of a people's openness to being. (shrink)