An intuitive and widely accepted view is that (a) beliefs aim at truth, (b) many citizens have stable and meaningful political beliefs, and (c) citizens choose to support political candidates or parties on the basis of their political beliefs. We argue that all three claims are false. First, we argue that political beliefs often differ from ordinary world-modelling beliefs because they do not aim at truth. Second, we draw on empirical evidence from political science and psychology to argue that most (...) people lack stable and meaningful political beliefs. Third, we claim that the true psychological basis for voting behavior is not an individual’s political beliefs but rather group identity. Along the way, we reflect on what this means for normative democratic theory. (shrink)

This handbook provides an overview of key ideas, questions, and puzzles in political epistemology. It is divided into seven sections: (1) Politics and Truth: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives; (2) Political Disagreement and Polarization; (3) Fake News, Propaganda, Misinformation; (4) Ignorance and Irrationality in Politics; (5) Epistemic Virtues and Vices in Politics; (6) Democracy and Epistemology; (7) Trust, Expertise, and Doubt.

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. Studies 2a–b (...) found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

The employment application form is a major source of information about candidates for many companies. It is also a potential source of infringement by the company upon the privacy of the individual. Although September 1984 saw the passing into law of the Data Protection Act, the U.K. has not been in the forefront of civil rights where employees and personal information are concerned. During an extended interview with members of a personnel department of a major company, several issues relating to (...) privacy issues were revealed and these are discussed in the paper. Although these interviews were carried out before the new law came into effect, they do show that this and many similar organisations may experience problems over compliance. This is particularly likely in the computerisation of personnel records and employees' access to their personal information. (shrink)

This article sets out to describe how churches have responded and continue to respond to fast-changing urban environments in Pretoria Central and Mamelodi East, animating Henri Lefebvre’s sociological perspective of citadins or urban inhabitants. We make tentative interpretations and offer critical appreciation. Churches, which were historically separated from the city centre, now directly participate in claiming a right to the city. With necessary fluidity, churches express lived African urbanisms through informality, place-making, spatial innovation and everyday rituals. Though not exhaustive, the (...) article focuses on rituals shared among historic urban Christians and contemporary African urban Christians, namely prayer, listening to the Bible and worship. These rituals, when combined with the churches’ spatial innovation, to a certain degree contribute to place-making. (shrink)

We examine whether Thomsonian constitutivism, a metaethical view that analyses value in terms of ‘goodness-fixing kinds,’ i.e. kinds that themselves set the standards for being a good instance of the respective kind, offers a satisfactory explanation of value change and disagreement. While value disagreement has long been considered an important explanandum, we introduce value change as a closely related but distinct phenomenon of metaethical interest. We argue that constitutivism fails to explain both phenomena because of its commitment to goodness-fixing kinds. (...) Constitutivism explains away disagreement and at best explains the emergence of new values, not genuine change. Therefore, Thomsonian constitutivism is not a good fix for realist problems with explaining value disagreement, and value change. (shrink)

What kind of society do we live in? What kind of politics can help us to live in a good society? The first of these questions is essential to theory of society, the second to political theory. The contributions in this volume investigate the relationship between these two questions and, thus, open new perspectives for assessing politics and the society. The opposing terms "renewal" and "disenchantment" are herein used as leading ideas by which political theory could provide impulses to theory (...) of society. (shrink)

Deep learning and other black-box models are becoming more and more popular today. Despite their high performance, they may not be accepted ethically or legally because of their lack of explainability. This paper presents the increasing number of legal requirements on machine learning model interpretability and explainability in the context of private and public decision making. It then explains how those legal requirements can be implemented into machine-learning models and concludes with a call for more inter-disciplinary research on explainability.

The editing of the correspondence of major figures in intellectual history is an essential scholarly activity. Yet in this country in recent years it has neither been the priority it should be, nor has it received the support that it deserves. Of course there have been exceptions to this, perhaps notably – for the early modern period – the epic one-man effort of Esmond de Beer in his later years in producing The Correspondence of John Locke (though this regrettably, and (...) frustratingly, lacks a composite index). A further exception, the edition of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg by A. R. and M. B. Hall, was unfortunately flawed by the need to change publishers midway in the series, which has led to a marked disparity in the availability of the latter part of the set compared with its early volumes. In any case, like the Locke edition, this was conceived in the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, and few have ventured such enterprises since. Virtually the only exception is Noel Malcolm's edition of the manageable-sized Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (two volumes, 1994). Moreover, it is revealing of the acute need to justify the publication of such material felt by editors and publishers alike that the promotional leaflet for this edition went so far as to claim that it was ‘one of the most important scholarly publications of the twentieth century’ – a claim that is the more ironic in view of the quite significant shortcomings in its method of presenting the material that it contains. (shrink)

A simple numerical procedure is presented for the problem of estimating the parameters of models for the distribution of eggs oviposited in a host. The modelling is extended to incorporate both host density and time dependence to produce a remarkably parsimonious structure with only seven parameters to describe a data set of over 3,000 observations. This is further refined using a mixed model to accommodate several large outliers. Both models show that the level of superparasitism declines with increasing host density, (...) and the rate declines over time. It is proposed that the differing behaviours represented by the mixed model may reflect a balance between behavioural strategies of different selective benefit. (shrink)

The contribution deals with the sources of Kant's criticism of the historical knowledge of philosophy. This criticism is an important motif in Kant's thought. Its contents are directed against Wolffianism. Nevertheless it was Christian Wolff who gave Kant the concept of the historical knowledge of philosophy. This concept is of great importance for Wolff, too. It can be traced back to the fight against Aristotelian scholastic philosophy. The reading of the traditional handbooks was criticized early, and the individual's own meditation (...) was challenged. Wolff formulated these intentions in his term: the historical knowledge of philosophy. Christian Thomasius and his followers, on the other hand, continued to criticize learning with the help of the memory, and they demanded the individual's own meditation. From this the slogan 'Selbstdenken' originated. Because of the opposition between the Wolffians and their opponents, for a long time 'self-thinking' and 'historical knowledge of philosophy' were treated side by side and independently of each other. Kant was the first to connect them definitively. He acknowledges the clarity of Wolff's terminology, but fills it up with the old content. (shrink)

This paper is a nontechnical exposition of the author's view that mathematics is a science of patterns and that mathematical objects are positions in patterns. the new elements in this paper are epistemological, i.e., first steps towards a postulational theory of the genesis of our knowledge of patterns.

How can finance be durably democratized? In the centers of financial power in both the United States and the United Kingdom, proposals now circulate to give workers and the public more say over how flows of credit are allocated. This article examines five democratization proposals: credit union franchises, public investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, inclusive ownership funds, and bank nationalization. It considers how these plans might activate worker and public engagement in decision making about finance by focusing on three modes (...) of public participation: representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative minipublics. It then considers the degree to which democratization plans might be resilient to de-democratization threats from business. It argues that of the five, bank nationalization goes furthest in guarding against de-democratization threats but is still pocked with pitfalls if it relies solely on representative democracy. It argues that two criteria appear necessary for democratically durable alternatives: the active direct participation of workers and citizens and the weakening of businesses’ capacity for democratic retrenchment. (shrink)

Die Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise stellt unsere Gesellschaft vor Herausforderungen, die wir so nicht kannten. WAs ist jetzt eigentlich wirklich wichtig - fur uns Menschen, individuell und als Teil eines Systems? Ist jetzt vor allem Sicherheit angesagt? Oder Gerechtigkeit? Menschliche Beziehungen? Und Verantwortung wer hat sie, wer nimmt sie an und kann sie mir jemand abnehmen? Bringt uns die Globalisierung zusammen oder fuhrt sie zur Ausbeutung jedes Einzelnen? Was fur eine Rolle spielt dabei die Religion? Dass die Antworten auf diese Fragen (...) drangen, zeigt die hitzige offentliche Diskussion uber die derzeitige Krise. MIchael Bordt SJ und seine Kollegen haben zu den alten Fragen der Menschheit ebenso ihren ganz eigenen Standpunkt wie zu der neuen Weltlage. IN einer Reihe von ebenso klugen wie mitreiSSenden Essays erfahren wir jetzt davon in einer reizvollen Mischung aus Philosophie, Spiritualitat und zeitgeschichtlicher Auseinandersetzung. (shrink)

In the introduction to Substance and Individuation in Leibniz, Jan Cover and John Hawthorne inform us that the aim of the book is to “grasp more clearly the metaphysical problems of individuation by taking seriously how these are played out in the hands of one influential philosopher standing as the important mediary between scholastic and modern philosophers.” Were the book to succeed in this modest aim it would be a significant achievement. In fact, it achieves this aim and a good (...) deal more. One can fairly say that the book is nothing short of a philosophical tour de force of most major metaphysical themes in Leibniz. (shrink)