It has been theoretically proposed that employees’ perceptions of their supervisor social power in the organization entail a potential to influence their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. However, no study has investigated such potential. This lack of research stems from the absence of a common understanding around the meaning of perceived supervisor social power and the absence of any validated measure. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to establish PSSP definition and to validate a five-item scale to measure this construct. (...) Three studies encompassing four independent samples of employees from three different countries and three different languages were conducted to assess the validity of PSSP. Results showed that responses to the PSSP scale presented excellent psychometric properties. Furthermore, the structure of the proposed five-item measure of PSSP was found to be invariant across four samples. Finally, PSSP nomological validity was assessed. Study 1 and Study 2 showed that PSSP was positively related to affective organizational commitment. All three studies showed that PSSP acted as a positive moderator of the relation between affective commitment to the supervisor and affective organizational commitment. Together, these studies support the psychometric soundness of the PSSP scale and presented the first evidence of its potential to influence followers. Implications of these findings for future research on supervisor social power are discussed. (shrink)

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In (...) Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals. (shrink)

In his major new work, David Boucher surveys the history of thinking about human rights and shows that far from being seen as universal and emancipatory, they have almost always privileged certain groups in relation to others.

How people learn chunks or associations between adjacent items in sequences was modelled. Two previously successful models of how people learn artificial grammars were contrasted: the CCN, a network version of the competitive chunker of Servan‐Schreiber and Anderson [J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 16 (1990) 592], which produces local and compositionally‐structured chunk representations acquired incrementally; and the simple recurrent network (SRN) of Elman [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179], which acquires distributed representations through error correction. The models' susceptibility to two (...) types of interference was determined: prediction conflicts, in which a given letter can predict two other letters that appear next with an unequal frequency; and retroactive interference, in which the prediction made by a letter changes in the second half of training. The predictions of the models were determined by exploring parameter space and seeing howdensely different regions of the space of possible experimental outcomes were populated by model outcomes. For both types of interference, human data fell squarely in regions characteristic of CCN performance but not characteristic of SRN performance. (shrink)

François Boucher | : Dans cet article, j’examine le rôle des villes dans l’aménagement de la diversité ethnoculturelle. Je me penche sur l’idée voulant que la prise en compte des spécificités du contexte urbain et de l’échelle géographique de la ville ait une certaine fonction heuristique. Une telle prise en compte nous mène à réviser notre compréhension des agent.e.s responsables d’honorer une conception de la justice, à revoir l’ordre du jour de la philosophie politique normative en mettant en lumière (...) des questions et problématiques spécifiques à ce contexte et, enfin, à discerner certaines possibilités et stratégies politiques visant à promouvoir la justice et le bien commun. Plus spécifiquement, dans le cadre d’une réflexion sur le multiculturalisme, une attention portée au contexte de la ville porte la promesse d’enrichir notre compréhension des politiques publiques susceptibles de promouvoir ou de compromettre l’intégration et la cohésion sociale dans les sociétés pluralistes. Ainsi, l’idéal de ville interculturelle propose de faire de la promotion des interactions interculturelles dans les espaces urbains un des piliers de la planification urbaine. Après avoir exploré le rôle spécifique des villes dans la mise en place d’une politique d’aménagement de la diversité ethnoculturelle visant à promouvoir l’intégration, je soulignerai quelques limites auxquelles se heurte l’idéal de la ville interculturelle. | : In this article, I examine the role of cities in the accomodation of ethnocultural diversity. I study the idea that there is a certain heuristic function in taking into consideration the specificities of the urban context and the geographic dimensions of the city. Such consideration leads us to revise our understanding of the agents called upon to honour a conception of justice; to take a second look at the agenda of normative political philosophy while shedding light on the questions and issues specific to this context; and, finally, to discern certain political possibilities and strategies aiming to promote justice and the common good. More specifically, paying attention to the context of the city within a reflection on multiculturalism promises to enrich our understanding of the public policies likely to promote or to jeopardize integration and social cohesion in pluralist societies. Thus, the ideal of the intercultural city offers to make the fostering of intercultural interactions in urban spaces one of the pillars of urban planning. (shrink)

Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of 'high art', Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is one of the most provocative and important yet least understood of contemporary thinkers. This book challenges this popular image and re-examines Adorno as a utopian philosopher who believed authentic art could save the world. Adorno Reframed is not only a comprehensive introduction to the reader coming to Adorno for the first time, but also an important re-evaluation of this founder of (...) the Frankfurt School. Using a wealth of concrete illustrations from popular culture, Geoffrey Boucher recasts Adorno as a revolutionary whose subversive irony and profoundly historical aesthetics defended the integrity of the individual against social totality. (shrink)

The British idealists made significant and lasting contributions to the social and political thought of the nineteenth century. They contributed to the evolution debate in insisting that the social organism could not be understood in naturalistic terms, but instead had to be conceived as an evolving spiritual unity. In this respect the British idealists developed a distinctive view of the state constitutive of the individual and they are commonly acknowledged as the forerunners of modern communitarian theory. Furthermore the idealists contributed (...) to the major debates of their day, including evolution, democracy, the role of the state, education and international relations. In his introduction, David Boucher develops the themes illustrated in the writings of the British idealists. This volume also contains biographies of the British idealists which incorporate their principal works. (shrink)

Mutation and lateral transfer are two categories of processes generating genetic diversity in prokaryotic genomes. Their relative importance varies between lineages, yet both are complementary rather than independent, separable evolutionary forces. The replication process inevitably merges together their effects on the genome. We develop the concept of “open lineages” to characterize evolutionary lineages that over time accumulate more changes in their genomes by lateral transfer than by mutation. They contrast with “closed lineages,” in which most of the changes are caused (...) by mutation. Open and closed lineages are interspersed along the branches of any tree of prokaryotes. This patchy distribution conflicts with the basic assumptions of traditional phylogenetic approaches. As a result, a tree representation including both open and closed lineages is a misrepresentation. The evolution of all prokaryotic lineages cannot be studied under a single model unless new phylogenetic approaches that are more pluralistic about lineage evolution are designed. (shrink)

This paper explores the rhetoric of obstetric ultrasound technology as it relates to the abortion debate, specifically the interpretation given to ultrasound images by opponents of abortion. The tenor of the anti-abortion approach is precisely captured in the videotape, Ultrasound:A Window to the Womb. Aspects of this videotape are analyzed in order to tease out the assumptions about the (female) body and about the access to truth yielded by scientific technology (ultrasound) held by militant opponents of abortion. It is argued (...) that the ultrasound images do not offer transparent confirmation of the ontological status of the embryo and fetus. Rather, the window of ultrasound is constructed through a complex combination of visual and verbal devices: ultrasound images, photographic images, verbal argument, and emotional appeal. (shrink)

I consider the broad perspectives in biology known as ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’, as well as a modern version of functionalism, ‘adaptationism’. I do not take a position on which of these perspectives is preferable; my concern is with the prior question, how should they be understood? Adapting van Fraassen’s argument for treating materialism as a stance, rather than a factual belief with propositional content, in the first part of the paper I offer an argument for construing functionalism and structuralism as (...) stances also. The argument draws especially on Gould’s insights concerning functionalism and structuralism, in particular their apparent historical continuity from the pre-Darwinian period through to today. In the second part of the paper I consider Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between empirical and explanatory adaptationism, and suggest that while the former is an empirical scientific hypothesis, the latter is closely related to the functionalist stance. (shrink)

Van Fraassen has argued that many philosophical positions should be understood as stances rather than factual beliefs. In this paper I discuss the vexed question of whether and how such stances can be rationally justified. Until this question has been satisfactorily answered, the otherwise promising stance approach cannot be considered a viable metaphilosophical option. One can find hints, and the beginnings of an answer to this question, in van Fraassen’s (and others’) writings, but no general, fully clear and convincing account (...) has been offered. I aim to provide such an account. In the first section I introduce the concept of a stance. In the second section I argue that stances may be justified pragmatically, in terms of both their epistemic fruits, and their coherence with values. In the third section I further consider the relationship between stances and values, arguing that the value-ladenness of a stance does not render it immune to rational scrutiny. In the final section I look at van Fraassen’s version of epistemological voluntarism, which plays a central role in his conception of the basis on which a stance may be rationally adopted. I show that voluntarism provides a theoretical framework, and approach to epistemology, within which the forms of justification appropriate to stance choice I outline in sections 2 and 3 find a natural home. (shrink)

I consider two attempts to combine realism with pluralism about the units of selection: Sober and Wilson’s combination of “model” and “unit” pluralism, and Sterelny and Griffiths’ “local pluralism”. I argue that both of these attempts fail to show that realism and pluralism are compatible. Sober and Wilson’s pluralism turns out, on closer inspection, to be a kind of monism in disguise, while Sterelny and Griffiths’ local pluralism involves a combination of realism and anti-realism about interactors, and the units of (...) selection, that is fundamentally unstable. My conclusion is that one must choose whether to be a realist or a pluralist in this area: one cannot be both. The question of which we should choose is a further question that I do not take a stand on. (shrink)

In ubiquitous surveillance societies, individuals are subjected to observation and control by authorities, institutions, and corporations. Sometimes, citizens contribute their own knowledge and other resources to their own surveillance. In addition, some of “the watched” observe “the watchers” “through” sous‐veillant activities, and various forms of self-surveillance for different purposes. However, information and communication technologies are also increasingly used for social initiatives with a bottom up structure where citizens themselves define the goals, shape the outcomes and profit from the benefits of (...) watching activities. This model, which we define as citizens’ veillance and explore in this special issue, may present opportunities for individuals and collectives to be more prepared to meet the challenges they face in various domains including environment, health, planning and emergency response. (shrink)

I argue that the Conceptual Ethics and Conceptual Engineering framework, in its pragmatist version as recently defended by Thomasson (2017, 2020), provides a means of articulating and defending the conventionalist interpretation of projects of conceptual extension (e.g. the extended mind, the extended phenotype) in biology and psychology. This promises to be illuminating in both directions: it helps to make sense of, and provides an explicit methodology for, pragmatic conceptual extension in science, while offering further evidence for the value and fruitfulness (...) of the conceptual ethics/engineering framework itself, in particular with respect to conceptual change within science, which has thus-far received little attention in the literature on conceptual ethics/engineering. (shrink)

Introduction History, Historicism and Hermeneutics In the Phaedrus Socrates argues that the written word is far inferior to the spoken word as a means of..

This is the first comprehensive study of the political philosophy of the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, best known for his contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history. However his political thought, and in particular his book The New Leviathan, have been neglected, even dismissed in some quarters. Professor Boucher argues for the importance of this political theory and provides a perspicuous account of its development and originality. He contends that The New Leviathan is an attempt to reconcile (...) philosophy and history, theory and practice. Collingwood's distinctive contribution to modern political and social thought is seen as his sustained project of distinguishing utility from right, and right from duty; the passion for history coincides with the ethical thought because Collingwood wishes to identify dutiful, or moral, action with a historical civilization. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript material, this book will prove invaluable to political philosophers and intellectual historians. (shrink)

There has been a significant renewal of interest in the British Idealists in recent years. Scholars have acknowledged their critical contribution to a number of philosophical theories in the fields of politics, law, morality, epistemology and metaphysics.. British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed offers a clear and thorough account of this key philosophical movement, providing an outline of the key terms and central arguments employed by the idealists. David Boucher and Andrew Vincent lay out the historical context and (...) employ analytical and critical methods to explain the philosophical background and key concepts. The book explores the contribution of British Idealism to contemporaneous philosophical, political and social debates, emphasizing the continuing relevance of the central themes of their philosophy. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of British Idealism, the book serves as an ideal companion to the study of this most influential and important of movements. (shrink)

"monumental work" - The North American Spinoza Society Newsletter , February 1999 "The sheer volume of this anthology makes it an indispensable asset to any serious scholar of Spinozism. Certainly no academic library can do without it. The quality of the material gathered here is extremely impressive. To the professional scholar of early modern philosophy many of the criticisms it contains may well look superficial and outworn, but even the best-informed experts will find much in it that will surprise and (...) delight." - Wipe van Bunge Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), Dutch metaphysician, psychologist, moral philosopher and philosopher of religion, is one of the most important figures of seventeenth-century rationalism. He is among the illustrious group of hugely influential thinkers of that time who were mathematicians and scientists as well as philosophers, a group that included Descartes, Leibniz and Hobbes. His thought has been continually reinterpreted and he influenced such people as Goethe, Lessing, Nietzsche, Shelley, George Eliot, Wordsworth, Bertrand Russell, Freud and Einstein. This unprecedented collection brings together some 150 historically and philosophically important discussions of Spinoza published in English in the two centuries following his death. The authoritative bibliography - Boucher's Spinoza in English: A Bibliography from the Seventeenth Century to the Present - cites a total of only about 300 publications from this period. Thus this collection gathers half of all materials so far identified and represents by far the most significant and interesting contributions. Internally cross-referenced, with an introduction, notes and full subject and name index, this essential collection also features an index of citations to the Ethics, by the editor. This will be an extremely useful resource for Spinoza specialists, research libraries, intellectual historians, and graduate students in philosophy. --a compilation of c.150 important pamphlets, papers and book chapters discussing Spinoza --the first collection of its kind - none of this material has previously been collected --6 reset volumes in royal size --extremely comprehensive, including many rare items --internally cross-referenced and fully indexed for easy use. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is contended that British Idealists, New Liberals and Liberal Imperialists were all in favour of imperialism, especially when it took the form of white settler communities. The concession of relative autonomy was an acknowledgement of the potential of white settler communities to go the way of America by severing their relationship with the Empire completely. Where significant differences emerge in their thinking is in relation to non-white territories in the Empire where native peoples comprised the majority, and the British (...) Government and its agents administered in trust ‘lower’ peoples on the scale of civilisation with the ostensible goal of guiding them towards self-determination in the Empire. The differences in degree of commitment to these ideals were largely expressed in terms of the pejorative categories of ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ imperialism, which were flexible and manipulated for political gain, rather than analytic precision. Liberal Imperialists and New Liberals were opposed to each other in terms of the degree to which they supported imperialism, whereas British Idealists aligned themselves on both sides of the divide. (shrink)

The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan is justly renowned as a powerful visual advertisement for his political philosophy. Consequently, its rich imagery has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary. Surprisingly, then, its gendered dimensions have received relatively limited attention. This essay explores this neglected facet of the frontispiece. I argue that the image initially appears to present a hypermasculine sovereign. However, upon closer inspection, and considered alongside Hobbes's economic theory, it yields to a reading of the sovereign as an ambiguously (...) gendered figure. Reading the frontispiece through the prism of gender and the economy reveals not a static image of unwavering male power but rather one of an equivocally-sexed creature teeming with life, contradictions, and complexities worthy of continued examination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Significance of R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of HistoryDavid BoucherThe Principles of History is the work that Collingwood saw as his principal philosophical enterprise, the book for which his whole intellectual life had been a preparation. It was to have been a work divided into three books. 1 In the first there was to be a discussion of the characteristics that make the special science of history distinctive. In (...) the second history was to be compared with other sciences. Third, he intended to investigate the relationship between history and practical life. He thought of beginning his project by giving a brief account of the different senses of the concept of history. Book one was divided into four chapters. The first was to concentrate on evidence and testimony relating them to scissors-and-paste history. Chapter two was to present a theory of action, res gestae, or action expressive of thought, in contrast with the idea of process, or change, associated with pseudo-history. In chapter three reenactment was to be discussed and contrasted with the idea of a dead past. Chapter four was to argue that history in contrast with other purported pretenders to the title can justifiably claim to be the science of the mind. Book two was divided into three chapters. Chapter one was to discuss history and natural science, showing that neither could be reduced to each other. He also wanted to contend that the natural sciences are themselves historical achievements in that they depend upon the historical facts of observation and thought. Chapter two was to deal with history and the human sciences, such as economics, which he describes as crypto-histories. In the third chapter Collingwood intended to explore the relation between history and philosophy. In book three, which is described less precisely, he wanted to argue that history overcomes the distinction between theory and practice, and that reenactment overcomes the dualism between mind and its objects. This, he thought, would enable him to give a characterization of historical morality and historical civilization in contrast with their utilitarian counterparts.He began writing the book on 15 February 1939 and had finished the first three chapters by 23 February. Over a month later, on 26 and 27 March, he began chapter four but was unable to formulate his thoughts on the past, and the relation between history and philosophy. At this point he stopped, never to return to the manuscript again. What we have left of The Principles of History deviates considerably from the original plan. Only three chapters were written, the third of which does not contain the crucial discussion of re-enactment. In addition, uncompleted fragments of the beginnings of a fourth chapter remain.In this paper I intend to look at why Collingwood’s explicit authorization to publish the Principles of History was disregarded by Knox and Oxford University Press. In addition, I want to look at three aspects of the rediscovered manuscript. In the second and third sections, on the method and subject matter of history respectively, I examine the extent to which Knox’s suppression of the Principles of History contributed to a good deal of the confusion surrounding the interpretation of Collingwood’s key ideas. What emerges from the pages of the Principles of History is how integral The Principles of Art and An Essay on Metaphysics are to understanding Collingwood’s later philosophy of history, a connection that is distorted by the patchwork nature of The Idea of History.In the fourth section of the paper I suggest that the most significant omission to which Collingwood never returned was the theory of reenactment. Reenactment more than any other aspect of his writings has been placed by interpreters at the centre of Collingwood’s philosophy of history. W. H. Dray’s new book is wholly focused upon this theme. Dray did not, however, see The Principles of History in time to incorporate the implications for reenactment theory of Collingwood’s broadening of the subject matter of history to include the emotions. 2 The theory of reenactment could no longer be sustained by the earlier argument found in The Idea of History, because Collingwood, in The Principles of... (shrink)

In recent years there has been a noticeable yet largely unacknowledged ‘pragmatic turn’ in the scientific realism debate, inspired in part by van Fraassen’s work on ‘epistemic stances’. Features of this new approach include: an ascent to the meta-level (the focus is not so much on whether scientific realism is true, but on the prior questions of the nature of the positions in this debate, how to decide whether to be a scientific realist, etc.); a reinterpretation of scientific realism and (...) anti-realism as (or as closely associated with) stances or frameworks, rather than theories or beliefs; a move away from the previously dominant empirical-explanatory (i.e. quasi-scientific or naturalistic) conception of scientific realism, anti-realism, and their justification; and a stress on the pragmatic and values-based elements in the debate. The traditional scientific realism debate is concerned with determining which position is true, or most epistemically justified. The new approach by contrast is concerned with determining which position best serves certain values, e.g. is most useful, fruitful, or otherwise prudentially preferable. In this paper we try to bring together the various strands in this new orientation, summarise its key features, contrast it with superficially similar but opposing views, and explore the similarities and differences among some of its adherents. Given we are advocates of the turn, we also offer a defence of the value and fruitfulness of this reconceptualization of the debate. (shrink)

This article describes how female managers with physical impairment negotiate their relationships in the workplace. It locates discussion of physical impairment and disability within an Interactional Model of Disability. Drawing on 20 interviews, this research identifies the factors that are central to the experience of female managers with disability in the workplace, including power, passing, and surface acting. When dealing with others who had power over them, the leaders adopted approaches such as passing, in an attempt to minimize the visibility (...) of both their impairment and their disability. This involved the leaders using surface acting to present an optimistic demeanor even when their actual feelings were very different. It will be argued that the use of surface acting and the reliance on passing begins to explain why people with disability are invisible in the workplace leadership literature and why this is damaging to diversity agendas in organizations. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s own interventions, these essays critically interrogate his ideas, challenging him to respond directly which (...) he does in an extended polemical reply that concludes the collection. This volume represents an exciting and important contribution to contemporary theoretical debate and adds significantly to the growing literature on Zizek. (shrink)

In this article, we compare Ricard Zappata-Barrero’s interculturalism with Tariq Modood’s multiculturalism. We will discuss the relation between distinct elements that compose both positions. We examine how recent discussions on interculturalism have the potential to contribute to theories of multiculturalism without undermining their core principles. Our position is close to that of Modood’s as he has already carefully tried to incorporate interculturalist insights into his own multiculturalism. Yet we provide a raise a few questions regarding Modood’s treatment of the relation (...) between multiculturalism and interculturalism. After summarizing each author’s potion (I), we will comment on the following set of relations between their basic elements: (II) The relation between intercultural contact and intercultural dialogue; (III) The relation between contact at the local level and the societal/state level; (IV) The relation between group-specific measures, intercultural contact and mainstreaming. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments seek to infer from the evolutionary origin of human beliefs about a particular domain to the conclusion that those beliefs are unjustified. In this paper I discuss EDAs with respect to our everyday, commonsense beliefs. Those who seriously entertain EDAs for commonsense argue that natural selection does not care about truth, it only cares about fitness, and thus it will equip us with beliefs that are useful rather than true. In recent work Griffiths and Wilkins argue that (...) this is a mistake. Fitness-tracking and truth-tracking are not rival, but rather potentially complementary, hypotheses about the function of our cognitive belief-forming systems. It may be that those systems maximise fitness by tracking the truth. I argue that while they are right about the standard EDAs for commonsense, the threat of evolutionary scepticism remains, because cognitive systems whose function is to track the truth may still be highly unreliable. I propose an alternative, Moorean approach to vindicating our commonsense picture of the world and dispelling the threat of scepticism. Once this has been established, however, we may appeal to evolution to explain the good fit between our cognition and the world. I thus propose that an evolutionary explanatory project ought to replace the troubled evolutionary justificatory project. This ought to be appealing to those such as Griffiths and Wilkins who seek a naturalistic non-sceptical account of our commonsense beliefs and their origins. (shrink)

Creationists have long argued that evolutionary science is committed to a dogmatic metaphysics of naturalism and materialism, which is based on faith or ideology rather than evidence. The standard response to this has been to insist that science is not committed to any such metaphysical doctrine, but only to a methodological version of naturalism, according to which science may only appeal to natural entities and processes. But this whole debate presupposes that there is a clear distinction between the natural and (...) the supernatural, and thus that naturalism is a meaningful doctrine. I argue that this assumption is false. The concepts of the natural and the supernatural are in fact hopelessly obscure, such that the claim that science is committed to methodological naturalism cannot be made good. This is no victory for anti-naturalists however; explicitly supernaturalist theories, such as Creationism, can be ruled out of scientific consideration as a priori incoherent, given that they presuppose for their intelligibility that there is a meaningful natural-supernatural distinction. This is not the case for standard scientific theories however, as they are not explicitly naturalistic theories; they do not postulate natural or physical entities or processes as such. (shrink)

In this article I intend to give more attention to Pufendorf's ideas than has been the custom among international relations theorists. The main focus will be upon Pufendorf's distillation and conceptualization of the implications of Westphalia in terms of sovereignty and the integrity of states. Furthermore, his extension of the Aristotelian classification of types of state, and his attempts to go beyond Bodin's and Hobbes's theories of sovereignty, provide the vocabulary and concepts in terms of which the different international actors (...) of the late seventeenth century could be understood. In this respect the focus is altogether different from Linklater. My emphasis upon the historical and emblematic character of the Peace of Westphalia, the personification of the state and its animation by sovereignty, which serves to facilitate Pufendorf's exploration of the idea of a system of states, and my suggestion that his ideas are not wholly redundant and may be used to explore some facets of a modern states system, serve considerably to extend Forsyth's brief analysis. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to intercorporeal ethics studies by enlarging their political understanding. Intercorporeal ethics revolve around the idea that, within organizations, our embodied interaction with each other is a conduit to enact genuine ethical relations of autonomy, mutual recognition, respect, care and responsibility. However, how intercorporeality can also be a means for organizations to shape and control their members’ ethical relationships in pursuit of corporate interests remains to be examined. We explore this political perspective on intercorporeality by combining (...) insights from Merleau-Ponty and Nussbaum. We analyze how the deployment of a lean management program in a financial institution produces unethical relations of objectification between employees by influencing their embodied interactions. Our study thus enlarges the political understanding of intercorporeality by showing the processes through which the embodied experience of one another is conditioned not only by our corporeal sensibility but also by managerial prescriptions. This provides a more nuanced understanding of intercorporeality as a basis to counter control and domination in organizations. (shrink)

The article introduces a special issue on “Rethinking Liberal Multiculturalism: Foundations, Practices and Methodologies.” The contributions presented in this special issue were discussed during the conference « Multicultural Citizenship 25 Years Later », held in Paris in November 2021. Their aim is to take stock of the legacy of Kymlicka’s contribution and to highlight new developments in theories of liberal multiculturalism and minority rights. The contributions do not purport to challenge the legitimacy of theories of multiculturalism and minority rights, they (...) rather aim at deepening our understanding of the foundations of liberal multiculturalism and of its practical implementation, sensitive to social scientific dynamics of diverse societies. Without abandoning the general idea that cultural minorities should be granted special minority rights, the essays presented raise new questions about three dimensions central to liberal multiculturalism: its normative foundations, its practical categories of minorities or groups, and its fact-sensitive methodology. Taken together they shed light on the renewed variety of theories of liberal multiculturalism highlighting their complexity and internal disagreements. To introduce these articles, the article first draws a brief historical overview of the debates on multiculturalism since the 1990s (section 1). It then highlights the distinctive aspects of Kymlicka’s contribution (section 2) and identifies recent research trends (section 3). Doing so, it explains how the articles gathered here both expand on those distinctive aspects and explore those new research avenues. The section 4 summarizes the contributions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore in what respects Thomas Hobbes may be regarded as foundational in international thought. It is evident that in contemporary international relations theory he has become emblematic of a realist tradition, but as David Armitage suggests this was not always the case. I want to suggest that it is only in a very limited sense that he may be regarded as a foundational thinker in international relations, and for reasons very different from those (...) for which he has become infamous. In the early histories of international thought Hobbes is a cameo figure completely eclipsed by Grotius. In early histories of political literature, the classic jurists were often acknowledged for their remarkable contributions to international relations, but Hobbes is referred to exclusively as a philosopher of a positvist ethics and absolute sovereignty. It is among the jurists themselves that Hobbes is believed to have made important conceptual moves which set the problems for international thought for the next three centuries. He conflates natural law and the law of nations, arguing that they differ only in their subjects—the former individuals, the latter nations or states. This entailed transforming the sovereign into an artificial man, not in the Roman Law sense of an entity capable of suing and being sued; rather, as a subject not party to a contract, but created by a contract among individuals who confer upon it authority. This subject is not constrained by the contractors, but is, as individuals were in the state of nature, constrained by the equivalent of natural law, the law of nations in the international context. Throughout, the methodological implications are drawn for modern historians of political thought and political philosophers who venture to theorise about international relations. (shrink)

En 2021, le livre de Van Rensselaer Potter intitulé Bioethics: Bridge to the Future a célébré son cinquantième anniversaire de parution. Or, la conception de la bioéthique proposée par l’auteur diffère de celle d’André Hellegers, qui a fait école. Pourtant, conçu comme guide, Potter y présente des éléments importants pour penser la place de la bioéthique dans le contexte sociétal et le développement actuelle des connaissances. Dans le texte qui suit, nous abordons certains éléments du contexte dans lequel ce livre (...) a pris forme. Nous nous arrêterons brièvement pour décrire la perspective dominante de la bioéthique. Puis, nous ferons ressortir certains éléments importants de la conception qu’a l’auteur de ce que devrait être la bioéthique. Nous terminerons en examinant les répercussions de cette pensée dans deux dossiers : celui de l’université et celui du développement durable dans sa perspective onusienne. Cette démarche nous conduira vers un élément que nous considérons important de la pensée de l’auteur, celui de l’ouverture. Ouverture qui est offerte à la bioéthique par l’inclusion de perspectives ayant cours quant aux compréhensions variées du vivant, ouverture à la considération des savoirs ancestraux et des savoirs communs, ouverture aussi à tout autre contexte, qu’ils impliquent des situations minoritaires, des personnes défavorisées ou autres. Cette ouverture donne un sens particulier à une valeur primordiale de la bioéthique, celle du respect de la dignité humaine. (shrink)

Cladism, today the dominant school of systematics in biology, includes a classification component – the view that classification ought to reflect phylogeny only, such that all and only taxa are monophyletic (i.e. consist of an ancestor and all its descendants) - and a metaphysical component – the view that all and only real groups or kinds of organisms are monophyletic. For the most part these are seen as amounting to much the same thing, but I argue they can and should (...) be distinguished, in particular that cladists about classification need not accept the typically cladist view about real groups or kinds. Cladists about classification can and should adopt an explanatory criterion for the reality of groups or kinds, on which being monophyletic is neither necessary nor sufficient for being real or natural. Thus the line of reasoning that has rightly led to cladism becoming dominant within systematics, and the attractive line of reasoning in the philosophical literature that advocates a more liberal approach to natural kinds, are seen to be, contrary to appearances, compatible. (shrink)

This paper is addressed to a specific question: why did Oakeshott fail to follow his own methodological prescriptions when he wrote and delivered his lectures on the history of political thought? In that respect it is about the manner of his studying the history of political thought rather than about its substantive content. I will briefly characterise the architecture of his characterisation, and contend that his view of the history of political thought, at least at the philosophical level,is shared by (...) many historians and philosophers alike, including John Rawls. It is contended, however, that the subject matter of Oakeshott's lectures encompassed much more than his triadic conception of political thought was meant to capture. His ideal characters of Enterprise Association and Civil Association o not supersede or replace the triadic conception. The triadic conception is meant to encompass purely philosophical reflection, whereas his ideal associative characters may encompass reflection at all three of the levels he discusses. Had the subject-matter of the lectures been more restricted, would he have employed his recommended methodology? I suggest that he would not have done, and go on to ask whether we too should abandon the idea of conceiving the history of political thought in terms of the three master traditions he recommended. (shrink)

For those who have understood the solution to the Liarʼs Paradox and the Paradoxes of Predication, presented in A Comprehensive Solution to the Paradoxes and The Solution to the Liarʼs Paradox1, it will come as no surprise how the Berry Paradox should be solved. Nonetheless, the solution will be presented here in a short note, for completenessʼ sake.

A solution to the Liar must do two things. First, it should say exactly which step in the Liar reasoning - the reasoning which leads to a contradiction - is invalid. Secondly, it should explains why this step is invalid.

This article describes a method of scoping for potential ethical contentions within a resource constrained research environment where actor participation and bottom–up analysis is precluded. Instead of reverting to a top–down analytical structure, a data-led process is devised. This imitates a bottom–up analytic structure in the absence of the direct participation of actors, culminating in the construction of a map of the ethical landscape; a high-resolution ethical matrix of coded interpretations of various actors’ ethical framings of the technology. Despite its (...) limitations, which are discussed, the map can subsequently support the identification of areas where ethical contentions may be raised. Here, the method is described with reference to the construction and analysis of a map of the ethical landscape of carbon capture and storage technology. Taken as a preliminary stage of a larger study, it can support the design and initiation of more sophisticated analyses which may integrate stronger bottom–up participation and facilitate a reflective, deliberative process amongst actors. (shrink)