For a century at least, parties have been central to the study of politics. Yet their typical conceptual reduction to a network of power-seeking elites has left many to wonder why parties were ever thought crucial to democracy. This book seeks to retrieve a richer conception of partisanship, drawing on modern political thought and extending it in the light of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Looking beyond the party as organization, the book develops an original account of what it is (...) to be a partisan. It examines the ideas, orientations, obligations, and practices constitutive of partisanship properly understood, and how these intersect with the core features of democratic life. Such an account serves to underline in distinctive fashion why democracy needs its partisans, and puts in relief some of the key trends of contemporary politics. (shrink)

Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling presents a reductio ad absurdum regarding the time-spans subject to moral evaluation. The text's classic dilemma depends on assuming that we only evaluate discrete, contextless instants. The pseudonymous author constantly seeks the single instant or moral “photograph” that indicates Abraham's status. Doing so, however, extracts scripture's moral legislation out from narrative, resulting in theological paralysis and thereby requiring an alternative temporal vocabulary for evaluating Abraham. Fear and Trembling contains an under-explored alternative that sets Abraham within (...) the covenantal narrative's temporality. The paper explores the consequences of shifting from evaluating instants to evaluating narrative durations, showing that while Genesis 22 remains a challenging episode, it also offers a model of imaginative faith, fidelity to promises, and hope in the face of trauma that focusing on moral instants overlooks. (shrink)

John Doris has recently argued that since we do not possess character traits as traditionally conceived, virtue ethics is rooted in a false empirical presupposition. Gopal Sreenivasan has claimed, in a paper in Mind, that Doris has not provided suitable evidence for his empirical claim. But the experiment Sreenivasan focuses on is not one that Doris employs, and neither is it relevantly similar in structure. The confusion arises because both authors use the phrase ‘cross-situational consistency’ to describe the aspect of (...) character traits that they are concerned with, but neither defines this phrase, and it is ambiguous: Doris uses it in one sense, Sreenivasan in another. Partly for this reason, the objections Sreenivasan raises fail to block the argument Doris provides. In particular, the most reliable data Doris employs, Milgram’s famous study of authority, is entirely immune to Sreenivasan’s objections. Sreenivasan has not shown, therefore, that Doris provides unsuitable evidence for his claim. (shrink)

Conditional learning, where agents learn a conditional sentence ‘If A, then B,’ is difficult to incorporate into existing Bayesian models of learning. This is because conditional learning is not uniform: in some cases, learning a conditional requires decreasing the probability of the antecedent, while in other cases, the antecedent probability stays constant or increases. I argue that how one learns a conditional depends on the causal structure relating the antecedent and the consequent, leading to a causal model of conditional learning. (...) This model extends traditional Bayesian learning by incorporating causal models into agents’ epistemic states. On this theory, conditional learning proceeds in two steps. First, an agent learns a new causal model with the appropriate relationship between the antecedent and the consequent. Then, the agent narrows down the set of possible worlds to include only those which make the conditional proposition true. This model of learning can incorporate both standard cases of Bayesian learning and the non-uniform learning required to learn conditional information. (shrink)

Perhaps the biggest radically unsolved problem about Part II of the Ethics is something that occurs in Part I, namely the definition of ‘attribute’ as ‘that which intellect perceives of substance as its essence’ (1d4). The term ‘intellect’ brings in just one of the attributes, namely thought, raising the question: A. What special privilege does thought have that entitles it to figure in the explanation of the..

We are defined by our faces. They give identity but, equally importantly, reveal our moods and emotions through facial expression. So what happens when the face cannot move? This book is about people who live with Mbius Syndrome, which has as its main feature an absence of movement of the muscles of facial expression from birth.

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Alberta, as well as across multiple sites in Canada, this article describes and discusses the practices and experiences of heating off the grid with renewable resources (i.e. passive solar and wood). Heating with renewable resources is herein examined in order to apprehend the cultural significance of dynamics of corporeal involvement in the process of creating indoor warmth. A distinction between energy for which corporeal involvement is relatively high (hot energy) and relatively low (cool energy) (...) is then made. Off-grid indoor warmth is therefore understood as a hot energy requiring intense involvement. The authors argue that thermoception is a type of affect with catalytic properties. (shrink)

A critical question for epistemologists is whether there are any inter-subjective requirements for having a justified belief C whether there is an >us= in >justification=. One recent epistemologist that has addressed this issue is Keith Lehrer. In Knowledge, Lehrer presents a..

ABSTRACTThis rejoinder represents a final installment in a debate between myself and Paul Gunn over the feasibility and desirability of deliberative democracy. Here I argue that our debate has helped clarify an ambivalence in the literature surrounding the ends and means of deliberative democracy. I specify two ways to understand both ends and means, establish their importance in deliberative theory, and show how they can be combined. I conclude by showing how this systemic view incorporates and overcomes several challenges facing (...) modern democracy, such as the necessity of expert authority, the role of partisanship, and the problem of social complexity. (shrink)

Ein zentrales Anliegen Richard Wollheims war es, Erkenntnisse der Psychoanalyse für die Philosophie fruchtbar zu machen. Mit dem Konzept des „körperlichen Ich” verweist Wollheim auf die mannigfaltigen Aspekte der körperlichen Repräsentation geistiger Zustände. Sei es, dass psychische Zustände durch körperliche Metaphern ausgedrückt werden, sei es, dass sie als physische Ereignisse repräsentiert oder halluziniert werden und als solche ihre Wirkung entfalten. Diese Repräsentationen eröffnen überraschende Zugänge zu den Funktionsweisen des menschlichen Geistes.

This article reviews the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to explore caregiving for dementia. It defends a dual thesis whereby it first articulates how Levinas provides a phenomenological description to account for why caregiving is subjectively dreadful and, second, how caregiving invites a fresh re-reading of Levinasian thought. The article introduces two different forms of otherness represented by death and dementia, respectively. This re-reading shows how dementia forces us to more immediately reckon with the intensity Levinas attributes to the nature (...) of human interaction. The article concludes with reflections about what dementia suggests about cultural attitudes towards responsibility and implications for caregiving practice. (shrink)

Over the last decade, patient and public involvement (PPI) has become a requisite in applied health research. Some funding bodies demand explicit evidence of PPI, while others have made a commitment to developing PPI in the projects they fund. Despite being commonplace, there remains a dearth of engagement with the ethical and theoretical underpinnings of PPI processes and practices. More specifically, while there is a small (but growing) body of literature examining the effectiveness and impact of PPI, there has been (...) relatively little reflection on whether the concept/practice of PPI is internally coherent. Here, the authors unpick a ‘paradox’ within PPI, which highlights a tension between its moral and pragmatic motivations and its implementation. The authors argue that this ‘professionalisation paradox’ means we need to rethink the practice, and purpose, of PPI in research. (shrink)

This essay considers the extent to which a concept of emergence can be associated with Effective Field Theories (EFTs). I suggest that such a concept can be characterized by microphysicalism and novelty underwritten by the elimination of degrees of freedom from a high-energy theory, and argue that this makes emergence in EFTs distinct from other concepts of emergence in physics that have appeared in the recent philosophical literature.

Our choices about what to eat have crucial implications for our stomachs, the welfare of animals, the natural environment, the arrangement of our society, our pleasure, and our health. So a lot is hanging on our decisions about what we eat. Moreover, these are not merely hypothetical ivory tower cases: every one of us typically makes these decisions (or has them made on our behalf) several times daily!

Recently Trent Dougherty has claimed that there is a tension between skeptical theism and common sense epistemology—that the more plausible one of these views is, the less plausible the other is. In this paper I explain Dougherty’s argument and develop an account of defeaters which removes the alleged tension between skeptical theism and common sense epistemology.

The aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse led to a revival of interest in earlier crises. Although the major focus of attention was on the 1929 bank failures that ultimately led to the Great Dep...

“Responses: A Summing Up” replies to the wide‐ranging contributions to the book. It argues for the complete exclusion of torture from public policy, and defends a broadly consequentialist ethical view of war. It discusses the mutual interplay between society and systems of belief, and urges the relevance of epistemology to dialogue between conflicting ideologies. In discussing an “external moral law,” it expresses doubts about “external reasons.” It discusses the obligation to alleviate poverty, recognizing how hard we find this, and looks (...) for ways of doing better by working with the grain of our psychology. It considers how fantasies about being hard and tough erode the compassion that inhibits atrocities. “Responses: A Summing Up” hopes to express some coherence of outlook toward these very diverse questions. (shrink)

This chapter explores the different grounds for accepting the claim that all truths are knowable, the assumption central to the derivation of Fitch’s result. It argues that although there is no compelling argument for holding that all truths are knowable, there are various positions in which this feature of semantic anti-realism fits naturally; rejecting this puts serious tension into a broad range of philosophical outlooks, including theism and physicalism. In the end, the paradox should be felt by everyone, even those (...) who do not accept the knowability claim, because the heart of the paradox is not simply in what is implied by the knowability claim, but in a lost logical distinction between what is actual and what is possible. (shrink)

This paper argues that Locke often used "ideas" to stand for qualities, and used the quality-word "mode" to stand for ideas, because of a substantive conflation in his thought; not because of a mere superficial ambiguity in his use of the word "idea." Suggestions are offered as to the possible sources of this conflation.

Crossing the border into the moral domain changes moral thinking in two ways: (1) the facts at hand become “anthropocentric” facts not easily open to revision, and (2) moral reasoning is often the servant of moral intuitions, making it difficult for people to challenge their own intuitions. Sunstein's argument is sound, but policy makers are likely to resist.