Traditionally, social entities (i.e., social properties, facts, kinds, groups, institutions, and structures) have not fallen within the purview of mainstream metaphysics. In this chapter, we consider whether the exclusion of social entities from mainstream metaphysics is philosophically warranted or if it instead rests on historical accident or bias. We examine three ways one might attempt to justify excluding social metaphysics from the domain of metaphysical inquiry and argue that each fails. Thus, we conclude that social entities are not justifiably excluded (...) from metaphysical inquiry. Finally, we ask how focusing on social entities could change the character of metaphysical inquiry. We suggest that starting from examples of social entities might lead metaphysicians to rethink the assumption that describing reality in terms of intrinsic, independent, and individualistic features is preferable to describing it in terms of relational, dependent, and non-individualistic features. (shrink)

I think that there is an awful lot wrong with the exclusion problem. So, it seems, does just about everybody else. But of course everyone disagrees about exactly _what_ is wrong with it, and I think there is more to be said about that. So I propose to say a few more words about why the exclusion problem is not really a problem after all—at least, not for the nonreductive physicalist. The genuine _dualist_ is still in trouble. Indeed, one of (...) my main points will be that the nonreductive physicalist is in a rather different position vis à vis the exclusion problem than the dualist is. Properly understanding nonreductive physicalism—and clearly recognizing that it is, after all, a form of _physicalism_—goes a long way toward solving the exclusion problem. (shrink)

Expressions of emotion pose a serious challenge to the view that we perceive other people’s emotions directly. If we must perceive expressions in order to perceive emotions, then it is only ever the expressions that we are directly aware of, not emotions themselves. This paper develops a new response to this challenge by drawing an analogy between expressions of emotion and perceptual media. It is through illumination and sound, the paradigmatic examples of perceptual media, that we can see and hear (...) objects around us. Instead of screening these objects from view, however, they enable our perception while being transparent to us. With reference to perceptual constancy and transparency, I show how expressions show up in our experience of emotions in a surprisingly similar way. Given this, we can understand expressions as the media _through_ which we perceive emotions and overcome the above challenge to an otherwise attractive view. (shrink)

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support transgenderism (...) seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

Efficiency requires legislative political institutions. There are many ways efficiency can be promoted, and so an ongoing legislative institution is necessary to resolve this choice in a politically sustainable and economically flexible way. This poses serious problems for classical liberal proposals to constitutionally protect markets from government intervention, as seen in the work of Ilya Somin, Guido Pincione & Fernando Tesón and others. The argument for the political nature of efficiency is set out in terms of both Pareto optimality and (...) aggregate welfare maximisation, and similar arguments can be generalised to other social values. (shrink)

It is a truism that humans are social animals. Thus, it is no surprise that we understand the world, each other, and ourselves in terms of social kinds such as money and marriage, war and women, capitalists and cartels, races, recessions, and refugees. Social kinds condition our expectations, inform our preferences, and guide our behavior. Despite the prevalence and importance of social kinds, philosophy has historically devoted relatively little attention to them. With few exceptions, philosophers have given pride of place (...) to the kinds studied by the natural sciences, especially physics. However, philosophical interest in social kinds is growing in recent years. I critically examine answers to a cluster of related questions concerning the metaphysics of social kinds. Are social kinds natural kinds? Do social kinds have essences? Are social kinds mind dependent? Are social kinds real? (shrink)

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge. First, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merge on the relative claims of reason and authority. Second, his use of antiquarian knowledge to supersede historicist accounts of change in time and to position the plebian social class as the true arbiters of language. Third, his understanding of philological (...) knowledge as an instrument of political change, and a foundational element in the establishment of democracy. By treating the philological imagination as a tool for bringing about political change, Vico’s plebian philology is radically democratic, and a crucial instrument in the struggle against the elite, from antiquity to the present. -/- . (shrink)

Agent-based models have played a prominent role in recent debates about the merits of democracy. In particular, the formal model of Lu Hong and Scott Page and the associated “diversity trumps ability” result has typically been seen to support the epistemic virtues of democracy over epistocracy (i.e., governance by experts). In this paper we first identify the modeling choices embodied in the original formal model and then critique the application of the Hong-Page results to philosophical debates on the relative merits (...) of democracy. In particular we argue that the “best-performing agents” in Hong-Page model should not be interpreted as experts. We next explore a closely related model in which best-performing agents are more plausibly seen as experts and show that the diversity trumps ability result fails to hold. However, with changes in other parameters (such as the deliberation dynamic) the diversity trumps ability result is restored. The sensitivity of this result to parameter choices illustrates the complexity of the link between formal modeling and more general philosophical claims; we use this debate as a platform for a more general discussion of when and how agent-based models can contribute to philosophical discussions. (shrink)

We consider the current debate between bioconservatives and their opponents—whom we dub bioliberals—about the moral acceptability of human enhancement and the policy implications of moral debates about enhancement. We argue that this debate has reached an impasse, largely because bioconservatives hold that we should honour intuitions about the special value of being human, even if we cannot identify reasons to ground those intuitions. We argue that although intuitions are often a reliable guide to belief and action, there are circumstances in (...) which they are not reliable. Intuitions—including intuitions about enhancement—are subject to various cognitive biases rendering them unreliable in some circumstances. We argue that many bioconservative intuitions about enhancement are examples of such unreliable intuitions. Given this, it is unrealistic of bioconservatives to expect others to rely on their unexamined intuitions. Furthermore, refusing to engage in debates about the reasons and values that underpin their intuitions about enhancement will have the effect of making bioconservative voices less relevant in policy debates about enhancement than they would otherwise be. (shrink)

Controversial and provocative, To Be Real is a blueprint for the creation of a new political force.

1 Some philosophers defend the thesis that women are adult human females. Call this the adult human female thesis (AHF). There are two versions of this thesis—one modal and one definitional. Accord...

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

Negation often reinforces problematic habits of othering, but rethinking negation can make good on feminist hopes for logic as a transformative space for inclusion. As Plumwood argues in her 1993 paper, not all uses of negation in the context of social identity are inherently problematic, but the widespread implicit use of classical negation has limited our options with respect to representing difference, ultimately reinforcing dualisms that essentialize social differences in problematic ways. In response to these limitations, I take inspiration from (...) Dembroff’s recent work on the metaphysics of genderqueer identity to build models of social identity using the Heyting-Brouwer logic developed by Rauszer in her 1974 paper. Ultimately, I argue that these models demonstrate both how classical negation reinforces problematic habits of othering and how alternative forms of negation can transform our treatment of social identity altogether. (shrink)

In order to distribute our thoughts and feelings, we must make intelligible and distributable copies of them. From approximately 1375 to 1450, certain Europeans started fully mechanized replication of texts and images, based on predecessor “smaller” technologies. What they started became the most powerful means for the distribution, storage, and retrieval of knowledge in history, up until the invention of digital means. We have scant information about the initiation of print technologies in the period up to Gutenberg, and the picture (...) of Gutenberg that we have has become a great deal more complicated than hitherto. There has not been, however, an approach to the “pre-printing” period in terms of the history of idea or intellectual history. After a brief survey of established approaches, this essay argues that distribution by impression, or print, is bound up with ancient metaphors for understanding communication by the making of multiples. I suggest that there is a rich field of study for printing history in the sophisticated concepts of reality that medieval and late Scholastic philosophy developed. These concepts helped to express and develop a desire or need for communication that led to the technology of replicating texts and images for wide and continued distribution. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the Thomistic vice of despair, one of two vices opposed to the theological virtue of hope. Aquinas's conception of despair as a vice, and a theological vice in particular, distances him from contemporary use of the term "despair" to describe an emotional state. His account nonetheless yields a compelling psychological portrait of moral degeneration, which I explain via despair's link to its "root," the capital vice of sloth. Cases in which sloth and its offspring (...) vices progress into full-fledged despair raise intersecting issues about whether and how despair might be remediable. I conclude by considering puzzles regarding despair's disordered effects on the intellect and will and weighing three possible means of remedying it. (shrink)

Feminist standpoint theory is a variety of feminist epistemology that has been active since the 1980s. Its two central tenets are (1) that knowledge is necessarily situated within a socio-political context, and (2) that certain socio-political positions or standpoints are epistemically privileged when it comes to “reveal[ing] the truth of social reality” (Hekman 1997). Over the course of its history, standpoint theory has encountered a number of problems which have revealed divisions among its supporters over certain fundamental philosophical commitments. In (...) this paper, I sketch out a phenomenological account of perception that can begin to address these problems, drawn largely from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. There are two major issues that I believe a Merleau-Pontyan view of perception can help alleviate. One is that there has never been a thorough articulation of a theory of perception underlying standpoint theory’s central claims. This is surprising, since arguments in favor of standpoint theory often emphasize that occupying a certain standpoint enables one to see the world differently (see Hartsock 1983, among others). The other problem is the complex tension between standpoint theory’s two central theses. Positing that knowledge is necessarily situated seems to make it difficult to account for one single reality about which some particular group could be epistemically privileged (Hekman 1997). Merleau-Ponty can help us resolve these issues by providing an account of perspectival perception wherein a multiplicity of different perceptual standpoints all nonetheless put us in touch with a single "external" world. Merleau-Ponty’s account also explains how it could be that some standpoints are better than others when it comes to accessing certain features of this world. For Merleau-Ponty, it is not a problem if each perspective is incomplete, partial, or even apparently conflicting with other perspectives. The proliferation of standpoints need not lead us into an unacceptably relativistic framework, as long as we are able to conceive of each of these standpoints as giving whoever occupies it access to some particular aspect of a singular, real, shared world. (shrink)

A report on Cornel West's Edinburgh Gifford Lectures 2024: "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane".

This paper advances a fresh theorization of historicity. The word and concept of historicity has become so widespread and popular that they have ceased to have definite meaning and are used to stand for unsupported notions of the values inherent in human experience. This paper attempts to repair the concept by re-defining it as the temporal aspect of the interdependence of life; having history is to have a life intertwined with the lives of all others and with the universe. After (...) separating out the looser uses, surveying some of the literature, and defining what needs to be done, the paper examines shortcomings in the very different and widely influential conceptions of historicity of Koselleck and Heidegger. It then advances a new conception and fits it into the theoretical and moral capabilities of the philosophy of history as a core of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Using a close reading of a single clause and its context in a section in A Pluralist Universe, we see the moral dangers James saw in traditional ontology, in particular its relation to war and peace. This analysis opens up James’s combining the personalist philosophy of his friend Borden Bowne (and others) with the pluralism he developed late in his career. This leads, further, to reflection of James’s performative philosophizing. Finding in James a theory of “pluralistic personalism” gives us a (...) fresh look at the far-reaching power of his basic concepts of moral philosophy. (shrink)

Bernard Linsky and Edward Zalta have recently proposed a new form of actualism. I characterize the general form of their view and the motivations behind it. I argue that it is not quite new – it bears interesting similarities to Alvin Plantinga’s view – and that it definitely isn’t actualist.

Many countries are experiencing increasing levels of demand for access to assisted reproductive technologies. Policies regarding who can access ART and with what support from a collective purse are highly contested, raising questions about what state responses are justified. Whilst much of this debate has focused on the status of infertility as a disease, we argue that this is something of a distraction, since disease framing does not provide the far-reaching, robust justification for state support that proponents of ART seem (...) to suppose. Instead, we propose that debates about appropriate state responses should consider the various implications for health and broader well-being that may be associated with difficulties starting a family. We argue that the harms and disruption to valued life projects of subfertility-related suffering may provide a stronger basis for justifying state support in this context. Further, we suggest that, whilst ART may alleviate some of the harm resulting from subfertility, population-level considerations can indicate a broader range of interventions aimed at tackling different sources of subfertility-related harm, consistent with broader public health aims. (shrink)

One central argument in favor of perceptual accounts of emotions concerns recalcitrant emotions: emotions that persist in the face of repudiating judgments. For, it is argued, to understand how the conflict between recalcitrant emotions and judgment falls short of incoherence in judgment, we need to understand recalcitrant emotions to be something like perceptual illusions of value, so that in normal, non-recalcitrant cases emotions are non-illusory perceptions of value. I argue that these arguments fail and that a closer examination of recalcitrant (...) emotions reveals important disanalogies with perception that undermine the perceptual model of emotions. (shrink)

Mark Pennington argues political systems should be decentralized in order to facilitate experimental learning about distributive justice. Pointing out the problems with Pennington's Hayekian formulation, I reframe his argument as an extension of the Millian idea of 'experiments in living.' However, the experimental case for decentralization is limited in several ways. Even if decentralization improves our knowledge about justice, it impedes the actual implementation of all conceptions of justice other than libertarianism. I conclude by arguing for the compatibility of egalitarian (...) redistribution with the epistemic virtues of markets pointed out by Hayek. (shrink)

Surveying nearly seven decades of habitual and obsessive reading, I consider how my character and psychology used reading to shape philosophical questions that move me into forms in which I could pursue them by reading. This became both the method and the substance of my philosophical work. It preserved some core emotional issues but also gave me the way to integrate them into scholarship and into my life.

Challenges, possibilities, and opportunitie for re-founding the tradition of philosophical personalism today.

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Though largely neglected by philosophers, the concept of ineffability is integral to the Christian mystical tradition, and has been part of almost every philosophical discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. After a brief introduction, this article surveys the most important discussions of divine ineffability, observing that the literature presents two mutually reinforcing obstacles to a coherent account of the concept, creating the impression that philosophical reflection on the subject had reached an impasse. The article goes on to (...) survey some more recent work, which draws on the conceptual resources of existential phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein. It shows that this work has made possible a new philosophical account of divine ineffability that surmounts the obstacles, overcomes the impasse and makes divine ineffability, once again, a live option in philosophy of religion. The article concludes with some brief remarks on how this alternative approach reflects recent trends in the discipline as a whole and has the potential to make a valuable contribution to live research questions in epistemology of religion. (shrink)

The public sphere should be regulated so the distribution of political speech does not correlate with the distribution of income or wealth. A public sphere where people can fund any political speech from their private holdings is epistemically defective. The argument has four steps. First, if political speech is unregulated, the rich predictably contribute a disproportionate share. Second, wealth tends to correlate with substantive political perspectives. Third, greater quantities of speech by the rich can “drown out” the speech of the (...) poor, because of citizens’ limited attention span for politics. Finally, the normative problem with all this is that it reduces the diversity of arguments and evidence citizens become familiar with, reducing the quality of their political knowledge. The clearest implication of the argument is in favour of strict contribution limits and/or public funding for formal political campaigns, but it also has implications for more informal aspects of the public sphere. (shrink)

I argue that the direct perception of emotion (DP) is best conceived in terms of event perception, rather than fact perception or object perception. On neither of these two traditional models can the perception of emotion be as direct as its counterpart in ordinary perception; the proponent of DP must either drop the ‘direct’ claim or embrace a part-whole model of emotion perception and its problems. But our best account of how we perceive events directly can be applied to emotion (...) perception without any loss in directness. Not only this but there are good reasons to think that such a conception better respects both empirical evidence and the phenomenology of emotion perception. (shrink)

Is it conceptually possible for an event, L, to be the cause of an earlier event, E? Some writers have employed the so-called bilking argument to attempt to show that the idea of such backwards causation is incoherent . According to this argument, if we are presented with what someone claims to be a case of backwards causation, it would be possible in principle to wait for E to occur, and then intervene to prevent the occurrence of L, thus demonstrating (...) that E could not have been caused by L after all. Moreover, if our attempts to bilk L-type events having observed E-type events always fail, we have grounds to argue that any causal relationship between the two is not one of backwards causation, but of ordinary, forwards, earlier-to-later causation.Does the bilking argument succeed in showing backwards causation to be incoherent? Before answering this question, let us deal with a far simpler reason for deeming backwards causation incoherent, whose elucidation now will be useful later. To those attracted to the view that temporal order is determined by causal order, 1 backwards causation may seem incoherent because on this view a cause is by definition earlier than its effect. I do not take issue with this view, and wish my conception of backwards causation to be compatible with it. 2 By ‘backwards causation’, I mean causation that runs in the opposite direction to some other causal processes, such that the temporal order entailed by such backwards causation is the reverse of that entailed by those other causal processes. In most philosophical discussions of backwards causation, we are at least implicitly given reasons to believe that these other causal processes dictate the …. (shrink)

If history—our past, the sum of our thoughts, passions, and deeds—is so pervasive, influential, and meaningful, why then do we lose sight of it? Why do we not gain good values from it? And if it is part of our existential core, why then do we so often fail to ravel it into our deliberations? I propose that very often and to a great degree it is shame that separates us from history.

This chapter explores two kinds of testimonial trust, what we call ‘evidential trust’ and ‘non-evidential trust’ with the aim of asking how testimonial trust could provide epistemic reasons for belief. We argue that neither evidential nor non-evidential trust can play a distinctive role in providing evidential reasons for belief, but we tentatively propose that non-evidential trust can in some circumstances provide a novel kind of epistemic reason for belief, a reason of epistemic facilitation. The chapter begins with an extensive discussion (...) of standard accounts of both kinds of trust and criticises especially the standard accounts of non-evidential trust. A new account of non-evidential trust is offered that avoids a number of difficulties that plague the standard accounts by rejecting what we call ‘attitude-liability assumptions’. (shrink)

What would a course on ethics look like if it took into account Alasdair MacIntyre’s concerns about actually teaching students ethical practices? How could professors induct students into practices that prompt both reflection on their cultural formation and self-knowledge of the ways they have been formed by it? According to MacIntyre, such elements are prerequisites for an adequate moral education. His criticism of what he terms “Morality” includes the claim that most courses don’t even try to teach the right things. (...) He charges that academic teaching has little if anything to do with character formation, whereas thick practices can transform lives in ways mere argument can never do. Even those who appreciate his arguments and agree with his criticisms, however, may find implementing more adequate forms of ethical instruction in the university classroom a tall order. My goal in this essay is to provide a sketch of my own experimental course on normative ethics in order to illustrate what teaching according to a more MacIntyrean program might look like. (shrink)

Our cultural situation is to seek a moral form of self-constitution, rather than an ontological or epistemological foundation. Such a moral ground lies in the paradox of willing surrender of the will to do wrong or dysfunctional acts in order to enter temporally-extended processes of moral change. But the paradox of willing surrender of the will requires analysis. The propositional form of it cannot be sustained and must instead give way to willingness as an ongoing choice. The self-reflexivity of the (...) will with which we accomplish this turns out to be a core activity of human activity that seeks openness to moral growth through humility. The paper suggests that self-constitution in this manner this is what freedom is for us and is therefore the source of our hope. (shrink)

Defining the capital vice of sloth (acedia) is a difficult business in Thomas Aquinas and in the Christian tradition of thought from which he draws his account. In this article, I will raise three problems for interpreting Aquinas's account of sloth. They are all related, as are the resolutions to them I will offer. The three problems can be framed as questions: How, on Aquinas's account, can sloth consistently be categorized as, first, a capital vice and, second, a spiritual vice? (...) These two questions lead to a third, namely, how is the condition of sloth possible, given Aquinas's moral psychology and the nature of the will? The resolution of these interpretive issues can help do two things. It can help explain the apparent inconsistency between traditional (ancient and medieval) and contemporary conceptions of this vice, and —if Aquinas's account is right— it can help us diagnose contemporary moral and spiritual maladies that may either go unnoticed or be confused with distinctively modern "virtues" like diligence and industriousness. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of freedom typically fail to capture an important kind of freedom—freedom to change what one cares about—that is central to our understanding of what it is to be a person. This paper articulates this kind of freedom more clearly, distinguishing it from freedom of action and freedom of the will, and gives an account of how it is possible. Central to this account is an understanding of the role of emotions in determining what we value, thus motivating a (...) rethinking of the importance of emotions in the mental lives of persons. (shrink)

In the first two sections of this reply article, I provide a brief introduction to the topic of ineffability and a summary of Ineffability and Religious Experience. This is followed, in section 3, by some reflections in reply to the response articles by Professors Metz and Cooper. Section 4 presents some concluding remarks on the future of philosophy of religion in the light of the most recent philosophical work on ineffability.

This introductory chapter provides a general framework for thinking about the relationship between wealth and power. It begins by situating the topic in the history of political thought, modern social science, and recent political philosophy, before putting forward an analytical framework. This has three elements: first, the idea of liberalism's public/private divide: a division between a power-wielding state from which wealth should be absent, and a market economy from which power should be absent; second, the two ways the division can (...) be transgressed by the power of the wealthy: by the wealthy subverting the power of the state and by directly exercising power within the economy; and third, the four different approaches to responding to the transgression, either aiming to reassert the public/private divide or to move beyond it. (shrink)

Games Studies reveals the performative nature of playing a character in a virtual-game-world (Nitsche 2008, p.205; Pearce 2006, p.1; Taylor 2002, p.48). Tbe Player/Character relationship is typically understood in terms of the player’s in-game “presence” (Boellstorff 2008, p.89; Schroeder 2002, p.6). This gives the appearance that living-into a game-world is an all-or- nothing affair: either the player is “present” in the game-world, or they are not. I argue that, in fact, a constitutive phenomenology reveals the Player/Character relationship to be a (...) multi-dimensional matter of empathy. I advance a broadly Schutzian framework, drawing on his 1932 discussions of “face-to-face encounters” and ”historical predecessors,” showing how at- tention to empathy reveals a variety of “presences” that different kinds of Player/Character relationships afford. The central determinants of empathetic affordances which I focus on here are (i) how much players know about a character (especially the character’s past) and (ii) how players learn this information.The purpose of this discussion will be to show that a phenomenological analysis reveals that the relationship between a player and their character is complex, highly variable, and inherently social. Furthermore, it will add to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that video games are rich social objects deserving of study. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider how the theological virtue of hope might be practiced. I will first explain Thomas Aquinas’s account of this virtue, including its structural relation to the passion of hope, its opposing vices, and its relationship to the friendship of charity. Then, using narrative and character analysis from the film The Shawshank Redemption, I examine a range of hopeful and proto-hopeful practices concerning both the goods one hopes for and the power one relies on to attain those (...) goods. In particular, I show how the film’s picture of the role friends and friendship play in catalyzing hope is a compelling metaphor for Christian hope’s reliance on God. (shrink)

The concept of the exception has heavily shaped modern political theory. In modernity, Kierkegaard was one of the first philosophers to propound the exception as a facilitator of metaphysical transcendence. Merging Kierkegaard’s metaphysical exception with early modern political theorist Jean Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, Carl Schmitt introduced sovereignty to metaphysics. He thereby made an early modern concept usable in a post-metaphysical world. This essay carries Schmitt’s appropriation one step further. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s replacement of transcendental metaphysics with contingent creaturehood, (...) it reintroduces the anti-foundationalist concept of repetition that was implicit in Kierkegaard’s paradigm but which was not made lucid until Benjamin crafted from the Schmittian exception a vision of political life grounded in creaturely existence. -/- . (shrink)

Heidegger’s engagement with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin often dwells on the issue of temporality. For Heidegger, Hölderlin is the most futural thinker (zukünftigster Denker) whose poetry is necessary for us now and must be wrested from being buried in the past. Heidegger frames his reading of Hölderlin in terms of past, present, and future and, more importantly, describes him as being able to poetize time. This paper examines what it means to poetize time and why Hölderlin’s poetry in particular allows (...) us to understand temporality as the interplay of presence and non-presence. (shrink)

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

Corporations are increasingly asked to specify a ‘purpose.’ Instead of focusing on profits, a company should adopt a substantive purpose for the good of society. This chapter analyses, historicises, and radicalises this call for purpose. It schematises the history of the corporation into two main purpose/power regimes, each combining a way of thinking about corporate purpose with specific institutions to hold corporate power to account. Under the special charter regime of the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, governments chartered companies to pursue (...) specific public purposes. Under criticism for corruption and lack of competition, the special charter regime gave way to the contemporary general incorporation regime, under which no particular purposes are demanded of corporations, and profit-seeking has become the norm. This regime has now come under criticism, with calls for a new social purpose regime. The analysis of these three regimes focuses on politicisation. The chapter argues that orienting companies to substantive social purposes requires politicising the business corporation, creating meaningful accountability mechanisms to align companies with the goals of the public. The purpose paradigm must overcome its political timorousness and be more institutionally radical. The difficulty is doing this without unacceptable corruption and inefficiency. A form of ‘proper politicisation’ is needed. At the end of the chapter, some directions for reform are discussed, which may deliver on that desideratum. (shrink)

This paper compares Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s accounts of the virtue of magnanimity specifically as a corrective to the vice of pusillanimity. After definingpusillanimity and underscoring key features of Aristotelian magnanimity, I explain how Aquinas’s account of Christian magnanimity, by making humandependence on God fundamental to this virtue, not only clarifies the differences between the vice of pusillanimity and the virtue of humility, but also showswhy only Christian magnanimity can free us from improper and damaging forms of dependence on the opinions (...) and standards of others, enabling us toavoid the moral pitfalls of both pusillanimity and presumption. (shrink)

Expert-informed public policy often depends on a degree of public trust in the relevant expert authorities. But if lay citizens are not themselves authorities on the relevant area of expertise, how can they make good judgements about the trustworthiness of those who claim such authority? I argue that the answer to this question depends on the kind of trust under consideration. Specifically, I maintain that a distinction between epistemic trust and recommendation trust has consequences for novices judging the trustworthiness of (...) experts. I argue for this by identifying the unique difficulties that emerge when a novice is asked not just to believe expert testimony, but to follow expert recommendations. I outline criteria for novice judgements of expert trustworthiness that have been proposed by Elizabeth Anderson and show that novel problems emerge for her criteria when we shift focus from epistemic trust to recommendation trust. More is needed when we are asked not just to believe the experts but to act as they recommend, because novices looking for trustworthy expert recommendations need to establish whether the recommended course of action supports what is important to them and accords with their values. (shrink)