The merits of these two books speak for themselves. The topic chosen by the author is one that is very much alive today and one that has provoked much discussion, some superficial, some quite definitely soul-searching. To this latter the author has made a very valuable contribution. Religious of either sex will be the poorer for ignoring these two works. He states clearly some biting truths which lay bare the deep laden fears which militate against really choosing fully a vocation—a (...) choice which is for better or for worse. The demands of a vocation are always there as a challenge. In fact ‘a feeling of revulsion from the sacrificial element, an experience of turning away can be in fact the first experienced states of a person in whom the divine call truly exists’. (shrink)

Preferably scientific investigations would promote true rather than false beliefs. The phenomenon of fraud represents a standing challenge to this veritistic ideal. When scientists publish fraudulent results they knowingly enter falsehoods into the information stream of science. Recognition of this challenge has prompted calls for scientists to more consciously adopt the veritistic ideal in their own work. In this paper I argue against such promotion of the veritistic ideal. It turns out that a sincere desire on the part of scientists (...) to see the truth propagated may well promote more fraud rather than less. (shrink)

Principles of bcnciiccnce require us to promote the good. If we believe that a plausible mom] conception will contain some such principle, we must address the issue of the demands it imposes on agents. Some writers have defended extremely demanding principles, while others have argued that only principles with limited demands are acceptable. In this paper I su ggest that we 100k at the demands 0f beneficencc in a different way; 0ur concern should not just be with the extent of (...) the demands faced by individual agents. Instead, we should consider how the demands imposed Ol'] an agent by a principle of beneiiccncc are affected by the level of compliance with the principle by others. Act—[email protected], for example, in effect requires each complying agent to shoulder her share of the demands of bcncficcnce plus as many of the shares of noncomplying agents as would be optimal. I suggest that we focus OH this feature ofconsequentialism, and not just on the very high demands it can impose Ol'] individual agents. Thus I defend the View that principles of beneiicence should not demand more of agents as expected compliance by othcr agents decreases, and formulate a principle of bencficcnce that meets this condition. This View about beneiicence and compliance is supported by a particular conception 0f beneiiccnce. Rather than as an aim we each have as individuals, benciicence could be understood as a cooperative project, where each of us aims to promote the good together with others. If s0, it would be natural t.. (shrink)

Defines the cutting-edge of scholarship on ancient Greek history employing methods from social science.

Principles of sufficiency are widely discussed in debates about distributive ethics. However, critics have argued that sufficiency principles are vulnerable to important objections. This paper seeks to clarify the main claims of sufficiency principles and to examine whether they have something distinctive and plausible to offer. The paper argues that sufficiency principles must claim that we have weighty reasons to secure enough and that once enough is secured the nature of our reasons to secure further benefits shifts. Having characterized sufficientarianism (...) in this way, the paper shows that the main objections to the view can be avoided; that we can examine the plausibility of sufficiency principles by appealing to certain reasons that support a shift; and that we should be optimistic about the prospects for sufficientarianism because many of our strongest reasons seem to be of this sort. This shift, I claim, is the overlooked grain of truth in sufficientarianism. (shrink)

Is there a limit to the legitimate demands of morality? In particular, is there a limit to people's responsibility to promote the well-being of others, either directly or via social institutions? Utilitarianism admits no such limit, and is for that reason often said to be an unacceptably demanding moral and political view. In this original new study, Murphy argues that the charge of excessive demands amounts to little more than an affirmation of the status quo. The real problem with utilitarianism (...) is that it makes unfair demands on people who comply with it in our world of nonideal compliance. Murphy shows that this unfairness does not arise on a collective understanding of our responsibility for others' well being. Thus, according to Murphy, while there is no general problem to be raised about the extent of moral demands, there is a pressing need to acknowledge the collective nature of the demands of beneficence. (shrink)

Liam Shields systematically clarifies and defends the political philosophy of Sufficientarianism, which insists that securing enough of some things, such as food, healthcare and education, is a crucial demand of justice. By engaging in practical debates about critical issues such as child-rearing and global justice, the author sheds light on the potential implications of suffientarianism on the social policies that affect our daily lives.

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic (...) images from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through Nineteenth Century debates about its standing as art, to Twentieth Century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

Philosophers of science debate the proper role of non-epistemic value judgements in scientific reasoning. Many modern authors oppose the value free ideal, claiming that we should not even try to get scientists to eliminate all such non-epistemic value judgements from their reasoning. W. E. B. Du Bois, on the other hand, has a defence of the value free ideal in science that is rooted in a conception of the proper place of science in a democracy. In particular, Du Bois argues (...) that the value free ideal must be upheld in order to, first, retain public trust in science and, second, ensure that those best placed to make use of scientifically acquired information are able to do so. This latter argument turns out to relate Du Bois’ position on the value free ideal in science to his defence of epistemic democracy. In this essay I elaborate, motivate, and relate to the modern debate, Du Bois’ under-appreciated defence of the value free ideal. (shrink)

This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is more than apparent. In this context, the article discusses recent work by Roger Scruton, Dominic Lopes, Kendall (...) Walton, Gregory Currie, Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, Noël Carroll, and Patrick Maynard in some detail. Specific topics addressed include: aesthetic scepticism, transparency, imagination, perception, information, representation and depiction. (shrink)

Sufficientarianism is a position in debates about distributive justice. Sufficientarianism states that whether individuals have secured enough of some goods is a question that is central to determining whether a society is just. In this paper I provide an overview of this work, and highlight what I think are the most interesting recent contributions to it. Towards the end, I describe a way forward for sufficientarians and argue, in stark contrast to Frankfurt, that sufficientarian accounts of distributive justice should be (...) pluralist and are more plausible when they accommodate, rather than reject, other distributive values, such as equality. (shrink)

Social scientists report difficulties in drawing out testable predictions from the literature on intersectionality theory. We alleviate that difficulty by showing that some characteristic claims of the intersectionality literature can be interpreted causally. The formalism of graphical causal modeling allows claims about the causal effects of occupying intersecting identity categories to be clearly represented and submitted to empirical testing. After outlining this causal interpretation of intersectional theory, we address some concerns that have been expressed in the literature claiming that membership (...) in demographic categories can have causal effects. (shrink)

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from (...) the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest. (shrink)

In a capitalist economy, taxes are the most important instrument by which the political system puts into practice a conception of economic and distributive justice. Taxes arouse strong passions, fueled not only by conflicts of economic self-interest, but by conflicting ideas of fairness. Taking as a guiding principle the conventional nature of private property, Murphy and Nagel show how taxes can only be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Justice or injustice (...) in taxation, they argue, can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular regime. Taking up ethical issues about individual liberty, interpersonal obligation, and both collective and personal responsibility, Murphy and Nagel force us to reconsider how our tax policy shapes our system of property rights. (shrink)

In the first sentence of the first section of A Theory of Justice Rawls writes that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions.” He soon elaborates.

This book offers an advanced introduction to central questions in legal philosophy. What factors determine the content of the law in force? What makes a normative system a legal system? How does law beyond the state differ from domestic law? What kind of moral force does law have? The most important existing views are introduced, but the aim is not to survey the existing literature. Rather, this book introduces the subject by stepping back from the fray to sketch the big (...) picture, to show just what is at stake in these old debates. Legal philosophy has become somewhat arid and inward looking. In part this is because the disagreement between the main camps on the important questions is apparently intractable. The main aim of the book is to suggest both a diagnosis and a proper practical response to this situation of intractable disagreement about questions that do matter. (shrink)

While there is hardly an aspect of Hume’s work that has not produced controversy of one sort or another, deciphering and evaluating his views on aesthetics involves overcoming interpretive barriers of a particular sort. In addition to what is generally taken as the anachronistic attribution of “aesthetic theories” to any thinker of the eighteenth century, Hume presents the added difficulty that unlike the other founding-fathers of modern philosophical aesthetics, he produced no systematic work on the subject, and certainly nothing comparable (...) to his efforts in epistemology, morals, politics, history, and religion. Even interpreting Hume’s most definitive expression of his views on aesthetic questions—the famous essay “Of the Standard of Taste”—is fraught with difficulties and, as the diversity of views on the piece demonstrates, only the most confident reader would take it as an unambiguous statement of Hume’s position. (shrink)

The post‐embryonic architecture of higher plants is derived from the activity of two meristems that are formed in the embryo: the shoot meristem and the root meristem. The epidermis of the shoot is derived from the outermost layer of cells covering the shoot meristem through repeated anticlinal divisions. By contrast, the epidermis of the root is derived from an internal ring of cells, located at the centre of the root meristem, by a precise series of both periclinal and anticlinal divisions. (...) Each epidermis has an independent origin. In Arabidopsis the mature shoot epidermis is composed of a small number of cell types: hair cells (trichomes), stomatal guard cells and other epidermal cells. In shoots, hairs take the form of branched trichomes that are surrounded at their base by a ring of accessory cells in a sheet of epidermal cells. The root epidermis is composed of two cell types: trichoblasts that form root hair cells and atrichoblasts that form non‐hair cells. Mutations affecting both the patterning and the morphogenesis of cells in both shoot and root epidermis have recently been described. Most of these mutations affect development in a single epidermis, but at least one, ttg, is involved in development in both epidermal systems. (shrink)

A contract theory is an attempt both to make normative sense of contract law as an institutional type and to come up with criteria for the evaluation of the law of any particular place. There is no precise rule telling us how far the prescriptions of a theory can deviate from actually existing contract law and still be a theory of contract — rather than a political proposal to replace contract law with something else. But we can say roughly that (...) contract theory aims to provide normative foundations for the type of legal institution that enforces (some) agreements and unilateral commitments. Having provided an account of the point of having an institution of that general kind, the theory can then be used to evaluate existing examples. (shrink)

Giovanni Arrighi was a leading figure in the development of world-systems theory and also contributed to a range of debates in Marxist thought. This symposium engages with Arrighi’s last book, Adam Smith in Beijing, which was the final instalment in his ‘trilogy’, following The Long Twentieth Century and Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. This Editorial Introduction traces the broad trajectory of Arrighi’s ‘trilogy’ and its concern with systemic cycles of accumulation, highlights additional major contributions by Arrighi, and (...) sketches some of the central arguments of the five symposium articles. *. (shrink)

The issue of what constitutes a person is examined in relation to whether or not the fetus or newborn has qualities of personhood. The discussion also dwells on birth and viability as determining factors in decisions concerning terminations. Such decisions are stated to be constrained by both biological and social factors, particularly in the way in which the fetus can possess personhood only through the ‘absorption’ of such froni its mother; both mother and fetus together are ‘the person’. This article (...) also considers whether, on Piagetian grounds, one can make personhood comparisons between infants and adults and suggests that such comparisons are a mistake. A social critique of Piagetian principles shifts the emphasis from individualism towards consideration of school, family and environmental factors. Equally, it is not feasible to view the fetus as an entity that is separate from its mother's perceptions of its social as well as its physical status. Finally, because termination decisions occur against ‘real life’ (and highly charged) backgrounds, we must reject any notion that such decisions are only an intel-lectual exercise. It is assumed that nurses would implicitly understand this and some attempt is made to state why this is so. (shrink)

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion in ideas and theories on art. Art itself has never been more popular, but much recent thinking remains inaccessible and difficult to use. This book assesses the work of leading thinkers (including artists) who are having a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art. Each entry, written by a leading international expert, presents a concise, critical appraisal of a thinker and their contribution to thought about art and its place in the (...) wider cultural context. A guide to the key thinkers who shape today's world of art, this book is a vital reference for anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, its history, theory, philosophy and practice. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical study of the Freudian psychoanalysis of religion from a hermeneutical perspective.

This book seeks to join the ongoing, interdisciplinary approach to children’s literature by means of sustained readings of individual texts by means of important works in the history of philosophy. Its inclusion of authors from both various departments—philosophy, literature, religion, and education—and various countries is an attempt to show how traditional boundaries between disciplines might become more permeable and how philosophy offers important insights to this interdisciplinary, critical conversation.

In his account of musical interaction and temporality, Schutz's outer-inner distinction appears to capture a component of everyday experience. But engagement with Wittgensteinian philosophy reveals Schutz's false contrast between literal and metaphorical components of language, a series of philosophical confusions stemming from reifications of mental verbs, and the attribution of genuine duration to phenomena that have life as linguistic objects. Consequently, Schutz's intended account of social interaction comes to rest upon a radically private concept of the subject. A sociology of (...) time, it is concluded, can avoid these conceptual traps by attending to the linguistic component of temporality. (shrink)

One important line of questioning for philosophers is to ask what the point of certain principles, concepts, values or practices is. This line of questioning helps us to work out whether something of putative importance is fundamentally important or only important insofar as it serves some other requirement. This, in turn, helps us to do a number of other important tasks, including evaluating the validity of the tasks we pursue and the validity of our approach to it. When we know (...) what the point of something is we better understand how and whether to approach it. Just as fishing for fun and fishing for a living should be carried out differently, if the point of an ideal like equality is to preserve a certain kind of social relationship, and not some pattern of distribution, then we have reasons to reconsider the things we do in the name of equality, what policies an appeal to equality can support and whether we really care about equality or something else. In this paper I explore, rather than challenge, the point of political philosophy and I show how this affects how political philosophers ought to approach, what I take to be, their central pre-occupation: defending and objecting to certain principles. (shrink)

This article reviews Cornelia Vismann’s 2008 book Files: Law and Media Technology. In addition to an overview of Vismann’s media materialist approach to the study of the law, it provides both a consideration of her relationship to Friedrich Kittler’s media theory and a more focused examination of certain functional writing entities that might extend Vismann’s genealogical approach. It is suggested that a closer analysis of one such entity, the list, can offer further insight into the epistemological and ontological questions the (...) book provokes. (shrink)

Does religious belief differ in any interesting way from other kinds of belief? For now, take ‘belief’ to mean how one takes the world to be, on the basis of which they act. Call beliefs like this ‘ordinary beliefs’. There are also more complicated, or abstract, beliefs. Call such beliefs ‘non-ordinary beliefs’. Are religious beliefs different in any significant or interesting way from what we call ‘standard belief’? Our analysis shows that they are not. Although the content of religious belief (...) is different, and sometimes so is the function, religious beliefs are still mental, dispositional attitudes that aim to provide a correct representation of the world. Therefore, religious beliefs are best understood as a sub-category of standard beliefs, alongside ordinary and non-ordinary beliefs. This account of religious belief provides further insight into the meaning of belief and supports a revision of a strict demarcation between standard and non-standard beliefs. (shrink)

Reference to security and intelligence in education today will undoubtedly elicit concerns over terrorism, radicalisation and, in the UK, counter-terrorism measures such as Channel and Prevent (UK...

What is the connection between capitalism and racial hierarchy? In line with the tradition known as `the theory of racial capitalism' we show that the latter can functionally support the former. As a social construction, race has just those features which allow it to facilitate the sort of stable, inequitable distributions of resources that tend to emerge in capitalist systems. We support this claim using techniques from evolutionary game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, and end by discussing the normative political (...) consequences of this relationship. (shrink)

The logical empiricists expressed a consistent attitude to racial categorisation in both the ethical and scientific spheres. Their attitude may be captured in the following slogan: human racial taxonomy is an empirically meaningful mode of classifying persons that we should refrain from deploying. I offer an interpretation of their position that would render coherent their remarks on race with positions they adopted on the scientific status of taxonomy in general, together with their potential moral or political motivations for adopting that (...) position. (shrink)

This paper traces the systematic connections between the structure of Hume's argument in "Of the Standard of Taste" and the way Kant presents the Antinomy of Taste in his Critique of Judgment. It is argued, however, that although there are striking parallels between the way Hume and Kant formulate their respective antinomies, there are significant differences in the way the two philosophers solve them. For while Hume's approach reflects his scepticism about the place of philosophy in common life, Kant's solution (...) confirms his view that philosophy can effectively correct the errors into which human reason naturally falls. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s theory of art meets the challenge of strong non-perceptual art, an idea I extrapolate from James Shelley’s account of non-perceptual art. I endorse the spirit of Shelley’s account, but argue that his examples fail to support his case because he does not distinguish between strong and weak non-perceptual art. The former has no perceptible properties relevant to its appreciation as art; the latter is not exhausted by appreciation of those perceptible properties it does have. I show (...) this by comparing Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Robert Barry’s All the things I know. For Kant, appreciating art aesthetically as art requires: (1) awareness that it is art and (2) responsiveness to the ideas presented. Taken together, this allows Kant to accommodate strong non-perceptual art. I consider three challenges to this view: (a) Kant is committed to a representational theory of art; (b) Kant is committed to a restrictive formalism about aesthetic judgements of art; (c) Kant’s understanding of aesthetic pleasure commits him to a perceptual theory of art. I reply that: (i) this is grounded in empirical generalizations external to Kant’s theory; (ii) Kant’s strong formalist views are at odds with his account of ‘subjective purposiveness’, and the latter has priority; (iii) Kant is offering a general theory of art, which must accommodate both literature and strong non-perceptual art. (shrink)