Every year, hundreds of patients in England die whilst waiting for a kidney transplant, and this is evidence that the current system of altruistic-based donation is not sufficient to address the shortage of kidneys available for transplant. To address this problem, we propose a monopsony system whereby kidney donors can opt-in to receive financial compensation, whilst still preserving the right of individuals to donate without receiving any compensation. A monopsony system describes a market structure where there is only one (...) ‘buyer’—in this case the National Health Service. By doing so, several hundred lives could be saved each year in England, wait times for a kidney transplant could be significantly reduced, and it would lessen the burden on dialysis services. Furthermore, compensation would help alleviate the common disincentives to living kidney donation, such as its potential associated health and psychological costs, and it would also help to increase awareness of living kidney donation. The proposed system would also result in significant cost savings that could then be redirected towards preventing kidney disease and reducing health disparities. While concerns about exploitation, coercion, and the ‘crowding out’ of altruistic donors exist, we believe that careful implementation can mitigate these issues. Therefore, we recommend piloting financial compensation for living kidney donors at a transplant centre in England. (shrink)

This article offers an extensive study of the idea of an animal afterlife in seventeenth-century England. While some have argued that the idea of an animal afterlife became prevalent at the time due to increased awareness of animals’ mental abilities, others have suggested it was due to greater sensitivity to animal suffering and the perceived need to square this suffering with divine justice. I show that both views are incorrect, and that seventeenth-century thinking about an animal afterlife was first (...) and foremost grounded in, and shaped by, speculations about end times and the restored creation based on a literal reading of a key passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:19–22), which thus served as the sedes doctrinae throughout the seventeenth century. Lastly, I show that those who entertained a future life for beasts also supposed that animals would have a functional role therein, considering animals as being present in the restored creation to serve some spiritual end rather than as being true beneficiaries in their own right. (shrink)

At the centre of Powers' (2019) China and England is an extraordinary forgotten episode in the history of political ideas. There was a time when English radicals critiqued the corruption and injustice of the English political system by contrasting it with the superior example of China. There was a time when they advocated adopting a Chinese conceptual framework for thinking about politics. So dominant and prevalent was the English radicals' use of this framework, that their opponents took to dismissing (...) their points as 'the argument from the Chinese'. In my review of Powers' book, I welcome the profound reconfiguration of our political understandings that knowledge of this historical episode brings. However, I question Powers' framing presumption that the generic problems of any complex society lead to convergence on a single master political value of 'social justice'. Surely there are deep and enduring differences amongst thinkers of political value, even within a single society, let alone across different societies. Taking this point seriously would challenge the simple linear directionality of Powers' story of moral and political progress. (shrink)

Leibniz wished that his Theodicy (1710) would have as great and as wide an impact as possible, and to further this end we find him in his correspondence with Caroline often expressing his desire that the book be translated into English. Despite his wishes, and Caroline’s efforts, this was not to happen in his lifetime (indeed, it did not happen until 1951, almost 250 years after Leibniz’s death). But even though the Theodicy did not make quite the impact in (...) class='Hi'>England that Leibniz had hoped it would, it did draw some attention from the English intelligentsia. In this paper I shall focus on two responses to the Theodicy that were made in England in the years immediately following its publication. First, I shall consider the response of Michel de la Roche and his efforts to promote the book to an English audience in 1711 (efforts which only came to Leibniz’s attention much later, in 1713). De la Roche’s response was broadly positive, though his admiration for the Theodicy was tempered by his belief that Leibniz had struggled – unsuccessfully – to reconcile free will with divine foreknowledge. Second, I shall consider the largely negative response of George Smalridge, the Bishop of Bristol, who delivered his verdict on the book in a letter to Sophie written in 1714. Leibniz subsequently wrote a point-by-point rebuttal of (most of) Smalridge’s criticisms in a letter to Caroline, conceding only one very minor point to the Bishop. As we shall see, some of the points of substance raised by de la Roche and Smalridge have loomed over the Theodicy ever since. (shrink)

It is well documented that people with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) can undergo personality changes, including becoming more impulsive in terms of how they behave. Legal guidance and academic commentary support the view that impulsiveness can render someone decisionally incompetent as defined by English and Welsh law. However, impulsiveness is a trait found within the healthy population. Arguably, impulsiveness is also a trait that gives rise to behaviours that should normally be tolerated even when they cause harm to the (...) person enacting the behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to show why both of these considerations present as significant challenges to the law in England and Wales. (shrink)

The Law Society recently published a practice note titled 'Prosecutions of victims of trafficking'. This practice note comes many years after many lawyers had highlighted the problem and after the government machinery had chuntered into action and passed the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 with explanatory notes and non-statutory guidelines for corporations. Since 2012 there had been issued warnings about the way defence lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK police were dealing with trafficking and the Criminal Cases Review (...) Commission as far back as 2012 had note the severe failings by defence solicitors, prosecution and police, leading to many appeals and potential miscarriages of justice. Even in 2012 there were 946 known human trafficking victims, including 234 children. There was an attempt at a Human Trafficking Bill in 2010 which came to a halt and several reports including one by the Prison Reform Trust and Cambridge University Press, notwithstanding many books by notable academics for many years before today. This article examines the inadequacies of the Law Society practice note on defending victims and the jumble of high-ideals but short-sighted and impractical parts of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. (shrink)

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is foremost a meditation on the significance of place. Each quartet is named for a place which holds importance for Eliot, either because of historical or personal memory. I argue that this importance is grounded in an ontological topology, by which I mean that the poem explores the fate of the individual and his/her heritage as inextricably bound up with the notion of place. This sense of place extends beyond the borders of a single life to (...) encompass the remembered past and the unknown future. How this broader narrative of the passing and enduring of human existence can be better understood is a primary concern of the work of Martin Heidegger, in whose Being and Time the historical, situated context of an individual within a community is an important theme. Even more important is his later work in which this theme is extended to include place and dwelling. Dwelling is a particularly rich and poetic idea, weaving the narratological, topological and temporal aspects of human existence together, offering a challenge to modern technology thinking. This paper explores Heidegger’s thoughts on the topology of Being within the context of a poem which, I contend, is also telling the story of human situatedness, and attempting to understand what it means to truly dwell. (shrink)

This essay challenges the influential view that Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt played a central role in inaugurating an ‘anti-utopian age’. While the two thinkers certainly did their share to discredit the radical utopian inclination to portray a political blueprint in the abstract, I show that neither was straightforwardly anti-utopian. On the contrary, both thinkers’ writings display a different kind of utopian thinking, consisting in an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities. Schematically put, Berlin’s utopia was England reconstructed (...) as a quintessential liberal society, whereas Arendt’s utopia was America reconstructed as a quintessential modern free republic. Those two polities differ from each other in important respects, but they share two essential features in common: they are claimed to be exempt from the rise of totalitarianism; and they allegedly give men and women the decent chance to live a fulfilling life. To illustrate Berlin’s and Arendt’s overlapping and yet differing visions, I consider their contrasting responses to the upheaval of 1968 – a possible utopian moment in the late 20th century. While their responses could scarcely be more different, they were informed by their shared desire to imagine an ideal polity in what both regarded as the darkest century in human history. (shrink)

This is a description and analysis of the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England. Challenging conventional perceptions of the Church as an intellectually moribund institution, the study traces the influence of thinkers such as Locke, Newton, Burke, and Gibbon on theological debate in England during this period.

Vitalism has been given different definitions and diverse figures have been labelled as vitalists throughout the history of ideas. Concentrating on the seventeenth century, we find that scholars identify as vitalists authors who endorse notions that are in diametrical opposition with each other. I briefly present the ideas of dualist vitalists and monist vitalists and the philosophical and theological considerations informing their thought. In all these varied forms of vitalism the identifiable common motives are the essential irreducibility of life and (...) the universality of life. (shrink)

English interpretations, appropriations, and transpositions of the figure of Don Quixote play a pivotal role in eighteenth-century constructions of so-called English national character. A corpus of quixotic narratives worked to reinforce the centrality of Don Quixote and the practice of quixotism in the national literary landscape. They stressed the man from La Mancha’s eccentricity and melancholy in ways inextricable from English self-constructions of these traits.2 This is why Stuart Tave is able to write that eighteenth-century Britons could “recast” Don Quixote (...) in a fashion that followed “national pride” in the “freedom” of their humors.1 However, Don Quixote’s integral place in patriotic self-constructions was troubled by gender. While national character was construed as masculine by default, quixotism’s association with masculinity was complicated by the potential passive penetrability of quixotism and the proliferation of narratives about female quixotic readers. This essay will analyze these tensions. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) are key examples of quixotic texts that respond to the figure of the female quixote by interrogating the relationship between Englishness, masculinity, and quixotism. (shrink)

This brief paper reviews language and presentation in a match report by Oliver Yew, senior football journalist for Sky Sports. I praise the bullet point summary, I note inconsistency in tenses used, and I ask after the definition of a consolation goal, presenting my own understanding.

A revisionist account of how philosophical induction was conceived in the ancient world and how that conception was transmitted, altered, and then rediscovered. I show how philosophers of late antiquity and then the medieval period came step-by-step to seriously misunderstand Aristotle’s view of induction and how that mistake was reversed by humanists in the Renaissance and then especially by Francis Bacon. I show, naturally enough then, that in early modern science, Baconians were Aristotelians and Aristotelians were Baconians.

In the 1960s, the Catholic Church made changes to its liturgy and ecumenical outlook during the Second Vatican Council. These changes sparked a small counter-revolution called the Traditionalists led by rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to keep the Latin Mass. My grandparents Derrick and Irene Taylor opened their home to the movement during the 1970s, offering their time, money and land for SSPX masses. They received backlash from modernist Catholics and Church leaders but held to their belief that the Traditionalists were (...) to save the Church. My research has sought to uncover why my grandparents involved themselves in the movement. (shrink)

Our modern ideals about liberty were forged in the great political and philosophical debates of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we seldom hear about women's contributions to those debates. This paper examines the ideas of early modern English women – namely Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Mary Overton, ‘Eugenia’, Sarah Chapone and the civil war women petitioners – with respect to the classic political concepts of negative, positive and republican liberty. The author suggests that these writers' woman-centred concerns provide a (...) unique historical perspective on these much-discussed ideals of freedom from external interference, freedom as self-determination and freedom from domination. (shrink)

David Hume’s legal theory has normally been interpreted as bearing close affinities to the English common law theory of jurisprudence. I argue that this is not accurate. For Hume, it is the nature and functioning of a country’s legal system, not the provenance of that system, that provides the foundation of its authority. He judges government by its ability to protect property in a reliable and equitable way. His positions on the role of equity in the law, on artificial reason (...) and the esoteric nature of the law, and on the role of judges in the legal system are all at odds with those of the common lawyers. (shrink)

Review of: Jean-Pierre Schobinger (Editor). Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts. Volume 3: England. 2 half-volumes. xxxiv + 874 pp., bibls., index. Basel: Schwabe, 1988. SFr 160, DM 195.

The core of the Conceptual artists (Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt; the Siegelaub group with Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner; English and American members of Art and Language) is situated in the art context of the late sixties and the first half of the seventies. The self-positioning of the Conceptual artists within the art world in texts dealing with art theoretical as well as institutional problems is outlined, and selected works are interpreted.

This is a review of Miles Hollingworth's recent intellectual biography of Wittgenstein.

This paper investigates how Edward Pusey, a nineteenth century Anglican clergy and scholar responded to Edward Manning’s claim that the Church of England is not an authentic church. This led the former to write his Eirenicon, as an intellectual justification and a response to apostolicity and catholicity of the Anglican faith. Eirenicon is an example in rigorous dialogue on religious faith claims. The ecumenical rapprochement suggested by Pusey is very insightful: emphasis on the elements that unites Roman Catholics and (...) Anglicans as rooted in traditions of the Apostolic Church. After more than 152 years, this work seeks for the relevance of Pusey’s Eirenicon in contemporary Roman Catholic–Anglican faith relationship. -/- . (shrink)

In England and Wales we have had a National Curriculum since 1988. How can it have survived so long without aims to guide it? This IMPACT pamphlet argues that curriculum planning should begin not with a boxed set of academic subjects of a familiar sort, but with wider considerations of what schools should be for. We first work out a defensible set of wider aims backed by a well-argued rationale. From these we develop sub-aims constituting an aims-based curriculum. Further (...) detail is provided here on one of the most central educational aims, to do with equipping each child to live a flourishing personal and civic life. [A later, more detailed account of an aims-based curriculum is available in Reiss, M and White J <An Aims-based Curriculum: the significance of human flourishing for schools> Institute of Education Press 2013]. (shrink)

Dido Belle was the illegitimate daughter of Captain Lindsay, the aristocratic nephew of William Murray, Scottish by birth and Lord Chief Justice of England for many decades. The book tells the story of Dido's life in Lord Mansfield homes, from the time her father begged Lord and Lady Mansfield to be wards of the child Dido to the death at age 88 of Lord Mansfield, mainly cared for by Dido and to Dido's young death at age 43. It also (...) raises issues of financial queries, Wills, Probate, and the place of a woman in society in those days, not quite chattel but not equal to men. (shrink)

In 1975, The New England Journal of Medicine published James Rachels' article 'Active and Passive Euthanasia'. The argumentative method that Rachels introduced, the Bare Difference Argument (also known as the Contrast Strategy), became one of the most widely used tools in ethical reasoning. The argument, however, fails to show active euthanasia being morally permissible. It fails because Rachels takes the intuitions from the case where letting die is morally impermissible and applies the intuitions to cases where letting die is (...) morally permissible. While it is possible to create thought-experiments that are more analogous to euthanasia, in this respect, than Rachels' cases, they too are disanalogous to euthanasia with some of the relevant features. Creating the perfect analogy, however, would be a mistake too. Such a case would be too analogous; people would simply be divided on what kind of moral intuitions they would have. The problem thus highlights a methodological limit in philosophical bioethics and raises questions related to the roles of philosophical ethicists in the context of assisted dying. (shrink)

By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may (...) distinguish three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g., `the present King of France'. (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g., `the present King of England' denotes a certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. `a man' denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases is a matter of considerably difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory which I am about to explain. (shrink)

A key challenge for probabilistic causal models is to distinguish non-causal probabilistic dependencies from true causal relations. To accomplish this task, causal models are usually required to satisfy several constraints. Two prominent constraints are the causal Markov condition and the faithfulness condition. However, other constraints are also needed. One of these additional constraints is the causal sufficiency condition, which states that models must not omit any direct common causes of the variables they contain. In this paper, I argue that the (...) causal sufficiency condition is problematic: (1) it is incompatible with the requirement that the variables in a model must not stand in non-causal necessary dependence relations, such as mathematical or conceptual relations, or relations described in terms of supervenience or grounding, (2) it presupposes more causal knowledge as primitive than is actually needed to create adequate causal models, and (3) if models are only required to be causally sufficient, they cannot deal with cases where variables are probabilistically related by accident, such as Sober’s example of the relationship between bread prices in England and the sea level in Venice. I show that these problems can be avoided if causal models are required to be monotonic in the following sense: the causal relations occurring in a model M would not disappear if further variables were added to M. I give a definition of this monotonicity condition and conclude that causal models should be required to be monotonic rather than causally sufficient. (shrink)

Logic diagrams have been increasingly studied and applied for a few decades, not only in logic, but also in many other fields of science. The history of logic diagrams is an important subject, as many current systems and applications of logic diagrams are based on historical predecessors. While traditional histories of logic diagrams cite pioneers such as Leibniz, Euler, Venn, and Peirce, it is not widely known that Kant and the early Kantians in Germany and England played a crucial (...) role in popularising Euler(-type) diagrams. In this paper, the role of the Kantians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be analysed in more detail. It shows that diagrams (or intuition in general) were a highly contentious topic that depend on the philosophical attitude and went beyond logic to touch on issues of physics, metaphysics, linguistics and, above all, mathematics. (shrink)

Consider a terrible situation that too many women find themselves in: 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year. Many of these women do not bring their cases to trial. There are multiple reasons that they might not want to testify in the courts. The incredibly low conviction rate is one. Another reason, however, might be that these women do not want the fact that they were raped to become the most salient thing about them. More (...) specifically, they do not want it to be the thing that others attend to the most—that others find most noticeable and memorable. In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘harmful salience perspectives’ to help to explain this and related phenomena. This refers either to attention on things that should not be salient, or not enough attention on things that deserve to be made salient. Following ideas within the feminist literature on objectification, I argue that we can be harmed when aspects of our identity that do not reflect our personhood—our agency, rationality, personality, and so on—are more prominent in the minds of others than aspects that do reflect our personhood. Crucially, these ways of attending do not need to implicate false beliefs and harmful ideologies to be harmful, but can be harmful in their own right. (shrink)

It is unknown to what extent medical researchers generalize study findings beyond their samples when their sample size, sample diversity, or knowledge of conditions that support external validity do not warrant it. It is also unknown to what extent medical researchers describe their results with precise quantifications or unquantified generalizations, i.e., generics, that can obscure variations between individuals. We therefore systematically reviewed all prospective studies (n = 533) published in the top four highest ranking medical journals, Lancet, New England (...) Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and the British Medical Journal (BMJ), from January 2022 to May 2023. We additionally reviewed all NEJM Journal Watch clinical research summaries (n = 143) published during the same time. Of all research articles reporting prospective studies, 52.5% included generalizations beyond specific national study populations, with the numbers of articles with generics varying significantly between journals (JAMA = 12%; Lancet = 77%) (p < 0.001, V = 0.48). There was no evidence that articles containing broader generalizations or generics were correlated with larger or more nationally diverse samples. Moreover, only 10.2% of articles with generalizations beyond specific national populations reported external validity strengthening factors that could potentially support such extrapolations. There was no evidence that original research articles and NEJM Journal Watch summaries intended for practitioners differed in their use of broad generalizations, including generics. Finally, from the journal with the highest citation impact, articles containing broader conclusions were correlated with more citations. Since there was no evidence that studies with generalizations beyond specific national study populations or with generics were associated with larger, more nationally diverse samples, or with reports of population similarity that may permit extensions of conclusions, our findings suggest that the generalizations in many articles were insufficiently supported. Caution against overly broad generalizations in medical research is warranted. (shrink)

In 2021, the men’s English national football team reached their first final at a major international tournament since winning the World Cup in 1966. This success followed their previous achievement of reaching the semi-finals (knocked-out by Croatia) at the 2018 World Cup. True to form, the defeats proved unfalteringly English; with the 2021 final echoing previous tournament defeats, as England lost to Italy on penalties. However, what resonated with the predictability of an English defeat, was the accompanying chant, ‘it’s (...) coming home’. A ubiquitous presence throughout the course of both tournaments—while chanted at England football matches, it was also repeated across social media, the press and commercial advertising—the chant originates from the 1996 single, Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home), performed by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds. In what follows critical attention will be given to examining how the song offers what will be argued is a melancholic outlook. By re-approaching examples of English nostalgia and hubris, this chapter will expose how illustrations of English melancholy offer the potential for promoting collective forms of expression, which, when contextualized alongside England’s lack of footballing success (for the men’s team, at least), can be offset against a melancholic mediation that is cognizant of the centrality of loss—both for the subject and our collective sporting endeavours. (shrink)

Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to (...) technical rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics. (shrink)

A crucial question in relation to support designed to enable the legal capacity of people with mental disabilities concerns when support constitutes undue influence. This article addresses this question in order to facilitate the development of law and policy in England and Wales, by providing a normative analysis of the different approaches to undue influence across decisions about property, contracts, health, finances, and accommodation. These are all potential contexts for supporting legal capacity, and, in doing so, the article compares (...) approaches to undue influence that are rarely considered together. -/- Drawing on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, third sector and public body documents, and law in England and Wales, the analysis identifies six models that conceptualise undue influence in terms of: modes of influence; an overborne will; an inference from the situation; an overborne will understood as a mental incapacity; an overborne will in connection with vulnerability; and impaired discursive control. This final approach is a novel proposal for understanding undue influence. The analysis highlights key policy-relevant issues that distinguish the models, and generates a deliberative framework for navigating them, with the ‘overborne will’, ‘inference-based’, and ‘discursive control’ models identified as potentially fitting for the support context. (shrink)

Would compulsory treatment or vaccination for Covid-19 be justified? In England, there would be significant legal barriers to it. However, we offer a conditional ethical argument in favour of allowing compulsory treatment and vaccination, drawing on an ethical comparison with external constraints—such as quarantine, isolation and ‘lockdown’—that have already been authorised to control the pandemic. We argue that, if the permissive English approach to external constraints for Covid-19 has been justified, then there is a case for a similarly permissive (...) approach to compulsory medical interventions. (shrink)

William Molyneux (1656–1698) was an Irish experimental philosopher and politician, who played a major role in the intellectual life in seventeenth-century Dublin. He became Locke’s friend and correspondent in 1692 and was probably Locke’s philosophically most significant correspondent. Locke approached Molyneux for advice for revising his Essay concerning Human Understanding as he was preparing the second and subsequent editions. Locke made several changes in response to Molyneux’s suggestions; they include major revisions of the chapter ‘Of Power’ (2.21), the addition of (...) the chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ (2.27), and the addition of the so-called Molyneux Problem (2.9.8). Molyneux repeatedly requested that Locke develops his views on morality. Additionally, their correspondence turned to questions concerning education and Molyneux’s keen interest in the topic likely prompted Locke to publish Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. Moreover, Molyneux drew on Locke’s anonymously published Two Treatises of Government in his The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, which was first published in the spring of 1698. Molyneux revealed Locke’s authorship of Two Treatises against Locke’s will, yet their friendship continued until Molyneux’s untimely death in October 1698. (shrink)

The Black antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791) is increasingly recognized as a noteworthy figure in the history of philosophy. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved at the age of 13 and shipped to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England, where the 1772 Somerset court ruling in effect freed him. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] broke new ground by demanding the immediate end of the slave-trade and of slavery itself, without any compensation (...) to slaveholders. Notwithstanding this, Cugoano endorsed the legitimacy of penal enslavement on principled grounds – like many other abolitionists writing in late eighteenth-century Britain. “Every free community might keep slaves, or criminal prisoners in bondage” – and even sell them. Amidst the growing literature exploring Cugoano’s abolitionism, his paradoxical justification of penal slavery has bewildered commentators. Far from an offhand inconsistency, I argue that this justification is deeply embedded within his moral and legal philosophy; constraining his antislavery arguments while simultaneously serving retaliatory aims. His two-pronged principle of just punishment – the lex talionis (‘eye for an eye, bondage for bondage’) as tempered by mercy – sometimes demands penally enslaving colonial slaveholders and slave-traders in turn. Throughout, I compare Cugoano’s justification of penal enslavement with those of other early modern philosophers, especially Locke and Kant. This helps me position Cugoano within the history of philosophy, thus making his views more accessible to a wider philosophical audience. It also indicates just how deeply theories of punishment shaped philosophical thinking about penal bondage in the period. (shrink)

This article is about the information relevant to decision-making capacity in refusal of life-prolonging medical treatment cases. We examine the degree to which the phenomenology of the options available to the agent—what the relevant states of affairs will feel like for them—forms part of the capacity-relevant information in the law of England and Wales, and how this informational basis varies across adolescent and adult medical treatment cases. We identify an important doctrinal phenomenon. In the leading authorities, the courts appear (...) to count the first-personal phenomenology of the available options among the information that adolescents seeking to refuse life-prolonging treatment must understand and appreciate in order to possess capacity; adults are not held to this (higher) standard. We evaluate this differential treatment in light of philosophical work on transformative choice—decisions involving options whose sensory character, and effect on our values and preferences, are grasped only through experience itself. (shrink)

According to the High Court in England and Wales, the primary purpose of legal interventions into the lives of vulnerable adults with mental capacity should be to allow the individuals concerned to regain their autonomy of decision making. However, recent cases of clinical decision making involving capacitous vulnerable adults have shown that, when it comes to medical law, medical ethics and clinical practice, vulnerability is typically conceived as opposed to autonomy. The first aim of this paper is to detail (...) the problems that arise when the courts and health care practitioners respond to the vulnerability of capacitous adults on the basis of such an opposition. It will be shown that not only does the common law approach to vulnerability fail to adequately capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults, the conception of vulnerability and autonomy in oppositional terms leads to objectionably paternalistic health care responses that undermine the autonomy of vulnerable patients as well as clinical and legal interventions that violate their autonomy. In response, the second aim of this paper is to show that the concepts of autonomy and vulnerability are necessarily entwined and, on that basis, the focus should be on promoting the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults where possible. In order to make this case, the paper explains the limitations of standard approaches to the autonomy of vulnerable adults and, in their place, offers a conception of legitimate, self-authorised autonomy that is fundamentally dependent on intersubjective practices of recognition. (shrink)

In 1672 John Eliot, English Puritan educator and missionary to New England, published The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to initiate the INDIANS in the knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to know how to make use thereof (Eliot 1672) The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof, Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson]. This roughly 80 page pamphlet introduces syllogistic vocabulary and (...) reasoning so that syllogisms can be created from Biblical texts. The use of logic for proselytizing purposes is not distinctive: What is distinctive about Eliot's book is that it is bilingual, written in both English and Massachusett (Wôpanâak), an Algonquian language spoken in eastern coastal and southeastern Massachusetts. It is one of the earliest bilingual logic textbooks and it is the first, and perhaps only, textbook in an indigenous American language.In this paper, we (1) introduce John Eliot and the linguistic context he was working in; (2) introduce the contents of the Logick Primer – vocabulary, inference patterns, and applications; (3) discuss notions of ‘Puritan’ logic that inform this primer; and (4) address the importance of his work in documenting and expanding the Massachusett language and the problems that accompany his colonial approach to this work. (shrink)

Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway’s thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises “those doctors” who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is “intimate present” in the body. In this paper, I argue that here she targets Walter Charleton, a well-known defender of Epicurean atomism in (...) mid-seventeenth-century England. My intention is to highlight the sophistication of Conway’s theory of soul-body relations vis-a-vis that of Charleton. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of a controversial aspect of Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic, the so-called Julius Caesar problem. Frege raises the Caesar problem against proposed purely logical definitions for ‘0’, ‘successor’, and ‘number’, and also against a proposed definition for ‘direction’ as applied to lines in geometry. Dummett and other interpreters have seen in Frege’s criticism a demanding requirement on such definitions, often put by saying that such definitions must provide a criterion of identity of a certain kind. (...) These interpretations are criticized and an alternative interpretation is defended. The Caesar problem is that the proposed definitions fail to well-define ‘number’ and ‘direction’. That is, the proposed definitions, even when taken together with the extra-definitional facts, fail to fix unique semantic extensions for ‘number’ and ‘direction’, and thereby fail to fix unique truth-values for sentences like ‘Caesar is a number’ and ‘England is a direction’. A minor modification of the criticized definitions well-defines ‘0’, ‘successor’ and ‘number’, thereby avoiding the Caesar problem as Frege understands it, but without providing any criterion of number identity in the usual sense. (shrink)

Based on Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the term, we conceive the decolonial turn as a form of liberating and decolonising reason beyond the liberal and Enlightened emancipation of rationality, and beyond the more radical Euro-critiques that have failed to consistently challenge the legacies of Eurocentrism and white male heteronormativity (often Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism). We complement Maldonado-Torres’s account of the decolonial turn in philosophy, theory and critique by providing an analysis of the trajectories of academic philosophy and clarifying the relevance of (...) decolonising philosophy and of the decolonial turn for current efforts in transforming philosophy in face of the challenges of social movements such as the Third World Liberation Front and Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and England. After a brief analysis of the trajectory and current status of philosophy as a discipline in the modern Western research university, we provide examples of the decolonial turn and of decolonising philosophy in three areas: the engagement with (1) Asian and (2) Latin American philosophies, and (3) debates in the philosophy of race and gender. (shrink)

In the last decade there has been an upsurge in the popularity of electric mountain bikes. However, opinion is divided regarding the implications of this emerging technology. Critics warn of the dangers they pose to landscapes, habitats, and ecological diversity, whilst advocates highlight their potential in increasing the accessibility of the outdoors for riders who would otherwise be socially and/or physically excluded. Drawing on interview data with 30 electric mountain bike users in England, this paper represents one of the (...) first attempts to empirically explore the experiential, ecological and socio-cultural implications of this activity. Utilising Stiegler’s (2013a) account of the pharmakon, in which technology is positioned as both remedy and poison, we suggest that the e-mountain bike’s role in the promotion of social and environmental responsibility is both complex and contradictory. Specifically, findings indicate that while this assistive technology can play a key role in facilitating deeper connections between riders as well as an ethic of care towards others, it can, at the same time, generate more individualised and automated experiences of recreational mobility in outdoor environments. (shrink)

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza is often called upon to support three theses: first, that Descartes had a dogmatic notion of systematic knowledge, and therefore of physics; second, that the hypothetical epistemology of physics which spread during the xviith century was the result of a general sceptical crisis; third, that this epistemology was more successful in England than in France. I reject these three theses: I point first to the tension in Descartes’ works between the ideal (...) of a completely certain science and a physics replete with hypotheses; further, I argue that the use of hypotheses by mechanical philosophers cannot be separated from their conception of physics; finally I show that, at the end of the xviith century, physicists in France as well as in England spoke through hypotheses and I examine different ways of explaining this shared practice. Richard H. Popkin’s book serves therefore as a starting point for insights into the general problem: to what extent and for what reasons some propositions in physics have been presented as hypotheses in the xviith century? (shrink)

Under the current Mental Health Act of England and Wales, it is lawful to perform deep brain stimulation in the absence of consent and independent approval. We argue against the Care Quality Commission's preferred strategy of addressing this problematic issue, and offer recommendations for deep brain stimulation-specific provisions in a revised Mental Health Act.

The main aim of this dissertation is to model the different ways in which we use language when we engage with fiction. This main aim subdivides itself into a number of puzzles. We all know that dragons do not exist. Yet, when I read the Harry Potter novels, I do accept the existence of dragons. How do we keep such fictional truths separate from ‘ordinary’ non-fictional truths? What is the difference between Tolkien writing down all sorts of falsities, and a (...) liar who also says all sorts of untrue things? How can it be true that Frodo was born in the Shire while it is also true that he was invented by Tolkien? Given that a fiction such as Pride and Prejudice is not about the actual world, how can I learn things about 19th century etiquette in England by reading this novel? -/- I develop a coherent semantic analysis of these different puzzles: the ‘workspace account’. This theory is an extension of Stalnaker’s famous pragmatic ‘common ground’ framework. In this framework, assertions are modelled as proposals to update the ‘common ground’ (the set of shared assumptions) between conversational interlocutors. (shrink)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale research and pharmaceutical regulatory processes have proceeded at a dramatically increased pace with new and effective, evidence-based COVID-19 interventions rapidly making their way into the clinic. However, the swift generation of high-quality evidence and the efficient processing of regulatory authorisation have given rise to more specific and complex versions of well-known research ethics issues. In this paper, we identify three such issues by focusing on the authorisation of molnupiravir, a novel antiviral medicine aimed (...) at reducing the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to multiply in the body, for clinical use by the National Health Service in England and the concomitant testing of molnupiravir through the large-scale Platform Adaptive trial of Novel antiviRals for eArly treatMent of COVID-19 In the Community randomised control trial. By analysing the ways in which the authorisation and clinical use of molnupiravir complicate standard approaches to clinical equipoise, standard of care and participant consent in the PANORAMIC randomised control trial, we will explain some of ethical implications for clinical trials that aim to study the efficacy and safety of new COVID-19 and other therapeutics when conditional authorisation has already been granted and when such treatments have already been made available to patients by national health providers. (shrink)

Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, traces the decisive role played by eighteenth century embryological research for Immanuel Kant’s theories of mind and cognition. I begin this book by following the course of life science debates regarding organic generation in England and France between 1650 and 1750 before turning to a description of their influence in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Once this background has been established, the remainder of Kant’s Organicism moves (...) to the influential role played by models of embryological development for Kant’s approach to understanding the cognitive processes responsible for the generation of knowledge, with special attention paid to Kant’s Precritical writings in the 1760s and 1770s. The book closes with a reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)