Avicenna’s logical theory of negative judgement can be seen as a systematic development of the insights Aristotle had laid out in the De interpretatione. However, in order to grasp the full extent of his theory one must extend the examination from the logical works to the metaphysical and psychological bases of negative judgement. Avicenna himself often refrains from the explicit treatment of the connections between logic and metaphysics or psychology, or treats them in a rather oblique fashion. Time and again (...) he is satisfied with noting that this or that question is not proper for a logician and should be dealt with in metaphysics or psychology—without bothering to refer his reader to the exact loci. The following is an attempt at a reconstruction of Avicenna’s theory of negative judgement in such a broad fashion. I will begin with his analysis of negative judgement as resulting from an operation of ‘removing’ the predicate term from the subject term. On this basis, I will move on to discuss how he conceives of the relation between negative judgements and affirmative judgements that contain privative or metathetic terms as well as the question of whether negative judgements can be reduced to affirmative ones. Having thus laid out his logical theory of negation, I move on to discuss the underlying metaphysics by looking at the relation between existence and non-existence, and existence and privation. Finally, I will address Avicenna’s scattered psychological remarks on how we can conceive of what does not exist. (shrink)

While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) as an issue of national security, human security, human rights, and global public goods. The global health governance literature is essentially untethered to a theorized framework to illuminate or evaluate governance. This article ties global health justice and ethics to principles for governing the global health realm, developing a theoretical framework for global and domestic institutions and actors. (shrink)

In recent years a powerful case has been made in defence of a system of global governance in which supra-state institutions are accountable directly to the citizens of the world. This political vision- calling for what is commonly termed a ‘cosmopolitan democracy‘- has been defended with considerable imagination by thinkers such as Daniele Archibugi, Richard Falk, David Held, and Tony McGrew. At the same time, a number of powerful arguments have been developed in favour of cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice. (...) Philosophers such as Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Onora O'Neill, Thomas Pogge, Henry Shue, and Peter Singer have developed formidable arguments against wholly local theories of distributive justice and have argued for cosmopolitan conceptions of distributive justice. (shrink)