Results for 'Hartley Slater'

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  1. Natural Kindness.Matthew H. Slater - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2):375-411.
    Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accommodate a particular sort of inquiry. Even if coherent, this situation isn’t (...)
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  2. Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds.Matthew H. Slater & Chris Haufe - 2009 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (3):265-276.
    Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of (...)
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  3. Understanding and Trusting Science.Matthew H. Slater, Joanna K. Huxster & Julia E. Bresticker - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (2):247-261.
    Science communication via testimony requires a certain level of trust. But in the context of ideologically-entangled scientific issues, trust is in short supply—particularly when the issues are politically ‘entangled’. In such cases, cultural values are better predictors than scientific literacy for whether agents trust the publicly-directed claims of the scientific community. In this paper, we argue that a common way of thinking about scientific literacy—as knowledge of particular scientific facts or concepts—ought to give way to a second-order understanding of science (...)
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  4. Denialism as Applied Skepticism: Philosophical and Empirical Considerations.Matthew H. Slater, Joanna K. Huxster, Julia E. Bresticker & Victor LoPiccolo - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (4):871-890.
    The scientific community, we hold, often provides society with knowledge—that the HIV virus causes AIDS, that anthropogenic climate change is underway, that the MMR vaccine is safe. Some deny that we have this knowledge, however, and work to undermine it in others. It has been common to refer to such agents as “denialists”. At first glance, then, denialism appears to be a form of skepticism. But while we know that various denialist strategies for suppressing belief are generally effective, little is (...)
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  5. Trust of Science as a Public Collective Good.Matthew H. Slater & Emily R. Scholfield - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1044-1053.
    The COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change crisis remind us that widespread trust in the products of the scientific enterprise is vital to the health and safety of the global community. Insofar as appropriate responses to these crises require us to trust that enterprise, cultivating a healthier trust relationship between science and the public may be considered as a collective public good. While it might appear that scientists can contribute to this good by taking more initiative to communicate their work (...)
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  6. A pragmatic approach to the possibility of de-extinction.Matthew H. Slater & Hayley Clatterbuck - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2):4.
    A number of influential biologists are currently pursuing efforts to restore previously extinct species. But for decades, philosophers of biology have regarded “de-extinction” as conceptually incoherent. Once a species is gone, it is gone forever. We argue that a range of metaphysical, biological, and ethical grounds for opposing de-extinction are at best inconclusive and that a pragmatic stance that allows for its possibility is more appealing.
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  7. Understanding “Understanding” in Public Understanding of Science.Joanna K. Huxster, Matthew Slater, Jason Leddington, Victor LoPiccolo, Jeffrey Bergman, Mack Jones, Caroline McGlynn, Nicolas Diaz, Nathan Aspinall, Julia Bresticker & Melissa Hopkins - 2017 - Public Understanding of Science 28:1-16.
    This study examines the conflation of terms such as “knowledge” and “understanding” in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is used to analyze all papers published in 2014 for the use of epistemic success terms. In the second set of data, all papers published (...)
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  8.  31
    Less Work for Theories Natural Kinds.Matthew H. Slater - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    What sort of philosophical work are natural kinds suited for? Scientific realists often contend that they provide the ‘aboutness’ of successful of scientific classification and explain their epistemic utility (among other side hustles). Recent history has revealed this to be a tricky job — particularly given the present naturalistic climate of philosophy of science. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of different sorts of theories. This phenomenon that has suggested to some that philosophical theorizing about natural kinds has reached (...)
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  9. Cell Types as Natural Kinds.Matthew H. Slater - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (2):170-179.
    Talk of different types of cells is commonplace in the biological sciences. We know a great deal, for example, about human muscle cells by studying the same type of cells in mice. Information about cell type is apparently largely projectible across species boundaries. But what defines cell type? Do cells come pre-packaged into different natural kinds? Philosophical attention to these questions has been extremely limited [see e.g., Wilson (Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, pp 187–207, 1999; Genes and the Agents of Life, (...)
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  10. Introduction: Lessons from the Scientific Butchery.Matthew H. Slater & Andrea Borghini - 2011 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knifework. “Ordinary butchers,” he replied “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also Watson (...)
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  11. Resilient Understanding: The Value of Seeing for Oneself.Matthew Slater & Jason Leddington - manuscript
    The primary aim of this paper is to argue that the value of understanding derives in part from a kind of subjective stability of belief that we call epistemic resilience. We think that this feature of understanding has been overlooked by recent work, and we think it’s especially important to the value of understanding for social cognitive agents such as us. We approach the concept of epistemic resilience via the idea of the experience of epistemic ownership and argue that the (...)
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  12. Trusting the Scientific Community: The Development and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Trust in Science.Matthew Slater -
    Trust in the scientific enterprise — in science as an institution — is arguably important to individuals’ and societies’ well-being. Although some measures of public trust in science exist, the recipients of that trust are often ambiguous between trusting individual scientists and the scientific community at large. We argue that more precision would be beneficial — specifically, targeting public trust of the scientific community at large — and describe the development and validation of such an instrument: the Scientific Community Trust (...)
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  13. Pluto and the Platypus: An Odd Ball and an Odd Duck — On Classificatory Norms.Matthew H. Slater - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61:1-10.
    Some astronomers believe that we have discovered that Pluto is not a planet. I contest this assessment. Recent discoveries of trans-Neptunian Pluto-sized objects do not require that we exclude Pluto from the planets. But the obvious alternative, that classificatory revision is a matter of arbitrary choice, is also unpalatable. I argue that this classificatory controversy — which I compare to the controversy about the classification of the platypus — illustrates how our classificatory practices are laden with normative commitments of a (...)
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  14. Anchoring in Ecosystemic Kinds.Matthew H. Slater - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1487-1508.
    The world contains many different types of ecosystems. This is something of a commonplace in biology and conservation science. But there has been little attention to the question of whether such ecosystem types enjoy a degree of objectivity—whether they might be natural kinds. I argue that traditional accounts of natural kinds that emphasize nomic or causal–mechanistic dimensions of “kindhood” are ill-equipped to accommodate presumptive ecosystemic kinds. In particular, unlike many other kinds, ecosystemic kinds are “anchored” to the contingent character of (...)
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  15. Macromolecular Pluralism.Matthew H. Slater - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):851-863.
    Different chemical species are often cited as paradigm examples of structurally delimited natural kinds. While classificatory monism may thus seem plausible for simple molecules, it looks less attractive for complex biological macromolecules. I focus on the case of proteins that are most plausibly individuated by their functions. Is there a single, objective count of proteins? I argue that the vagaries of function individuation infect protein classification. We should be pluralists about macromolecular classification.
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  16. (1 other version)Playing for the Same Team Again.Matthew Slater & Achille C. Varzi - 2007 - In Bassham & Walls (eds.), Basketball and Philosophy. University of Kentucky Press. pp. 220–234.
    How many championships have the Lakers won? Fourteen, if one counts those won in Minneapolis; nine, otherwise. Which is the correct answer? Is it even obvious that there is a correct answer? One is tempted to identify a team with its players. But teams, like ordinary objects, seem to survive gradual turnover of their parts. Suppose players from the Lakers are gradually replaced, one by one, over the years. We have the intuition that the team persists through this change, even (...)
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  17. Kant’s Neglected Objection to the Ontological Argument.Michael R. Slater - 2014 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (2):179--184.
    This paper argues that Kant’s most famous objection to the ontological argument -- that existence is not a real predicate -- is not, in fact, his most effective objection, and that his ”neglected objection’ to the argument deserves to be better known. It shows that Kant clearly anticipates William Rowe’s later objection that the argument begs the question, and discusses why Kant himself seems to have overlooked the force of this criticism in his attempt to demolish the traditional proofs for (...)
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  18. Review: Muhammad Ali Khalidi's Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences. [REVIEW]Matthew H. Slater - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (4):1017-1023.
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  19. A Novel Exercise for Teaching the Philosophy of Science.Gary Hardcastle & Matthew H. Slater - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1184-1196.
    We describe a simple, flexible exercise that can be implemented in the philosophy of science classroom: students are asked to determine the contents of a closed container without opening it. This exercise has revealed itself as a useful platform from which to examine a wide range of issues in the philosophy of science and may, we suggest, even help us think about improving the public understanding of science.
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  20.  67
    Xunzi, Dewey, and the Reinterpretation of Religion.Slater Michael R. - 2022 - Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 38:91-129.
    This paper compares the naturalistic interpretations of religion offered by the Chinese Confucian philosopher Xunzi (c. 310-219 BCE) and the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952), and shows how each philosopher reconceived the nature of religious life in fundamentally non-supernatural, ethical, and therapeutic terms. While acknowledging that there are important differences between their respective views—especially on such matters as the nature and scope of ethical knowledge, the nature of ethics, and what form an ideal society will take—and that their views (...)
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  21. Attempts to Prime Intellectual Virtues for Understanding of Science: Failures to Inspire Intellectual Effort.Joanna Huxster, Melissa Hopkins, Julia Bresticker, Jason Leddington & Matthew Slater - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (8):1141-1158.
    Strategies for effectively communicating scientific findings to the public are an important and growing area of study. Recognizing that some complex subjects require recipients of information to take a more active role in constructing an understanding, we sought to determine whether it was possible to increase subjects’ intellectual effort via “priming” methodologies. In particular, we asked whether subconsciously priming “intellectual virtues”, such as curiosity, perseverance, patience, and diligence might improve participants’ effort and performance on various cognitive tasks. In the first (...)
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  22. The Contexts of Simultaneous Discovery: Slater, Pauling, and the Origins of Hybridisation.B. S. Park - 2000 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 31 (4):451-474.
    This paper investigates a well-known case of simultaneous discovery in twentieth-century chemistry, the origins of the concept of hybridisation, in the light of Kuhn's insights. There has been no ambiguity as to who discovered this concept, when it was "rst in print, and how important it was. The full-#edged form of the concept was published in 1931 independently by two American scientists John C. Slater (1900}1976) and Linus Pauling (1901}1994), although both of them had made their ideas public earlier: (...)
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  23. ‘Learning to love’. Review of Richard Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature. [REVIEW]John Sutton - 2002 - Times Literary Supplement 5162.
    In a remarkable and utterly original work of philosophical history, Richard Allen revivifies David Hartley's Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749). Though it includes a detailed and richly annotated chronology, this is not a straight intellectual biography, attentive as it might be to the intricacies of Hartley's Cambridge contacts, or the mundane rituals of his medical practice, or the internal development of the doctrine of association of ideas. Instead Allen brings Hartley's book, (...)
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  24. Trees for a 3-valued logic.Fred Johnson - 1984 - Analysis 44 (1):43-6.
    Fred shows how problems with Slater's restriction of the classical propositional logic can be solved.
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  25. Belsham, Thomas and Ricardo.Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi - 2015 - In Heinz Kurz & Neri Salavadori (eds.), The Elgar Companion to David Ricardo. Edward Elgar. pp. 14-17.
    A discussion of the relationship between Ricardo and his Unitarian Minister Thomas Belsham, a New Testament scholar and the author of a philosophical treatise inspired by the Hartley-Priestley philosophy.
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  26. A genealogical map of the concept of habit.Xabier E. Barandiaran & Ezequiel A. Di Paolo - 2014 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (522):1--7.
    The notion of information processing has dominated the study of the mind for over six decades. However, before the advent of cognitivism, one of the most prominent theoretical ideas was that of Habit. This is a concept with a rich and complex history, which is again starting to awaken interest, following recent embodied, enactive critiques of computationalist frameworks. We offer here a very brief history of the concept of habit in the form of a genealogical network-map. This serves to provide (...)
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  27. Indigenous and Scientific Kinds.David Ludwig - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (1).
    The aim of this article is to discuss the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds on the basis of contemporary ethnobiological research. I argue that ethnobiological accounts of taxonomic convergence-divergence patters challenge common philosophical models of the relation between folk concepts and natural kinds. Furthermore, I outline a positive model of taxonomic convergence-divergence patterns that is based on Slater's [2014] notion of “stable property clusters” and Franklin-Hall's [2014] discussion of natural kinds as “categorical bottlenecks.” Finally, I argue that this (...)
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  28. What Kind of Revolutionary is Mr. Robot?Shane J. Ralston - 2017 - In Richard Greene & Rachel Robison-Greene (eds.), Mr. Robot and Philosophy: Beyond Good and Evil Corp. Open Court. pp. 73-82.
    Besides being the title of an EP by The (International) Noise Conspiracy, “Bigger cages, longer chains!” is an anarchist rallying cry. It’s meant to ridicule those political activists who compromise their ideals, make demands and then settle for partial concessions or, to put it bluntly, bargain with the Man. In the T.V. series Mr. Robot, Christian Slater plays the anarchist leader of a hacktivist group known as fsociety. Mr. Robot won’t negotiate with the FBI and E(vil) Corp for bigger (...)
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  29. Quantum-information conservation. The problem about “hidden variables”, or the “conservation of energy conservation” in quantum mechanics: A historical lesson for future discoveries.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Energy Engineering (Energy) eJournal (Elsevier: SSRN) 3 (78):1-27.
    The explicit history of the “hidden variables” problem is well-known and established. The main events of its chronology are traced. An implicit context of that history is suggested. It links the problem with the “conservation of energy conservation” in quantum mechanics. Bohr, Kramers, and Slaters (1924) admitted its violation being due to the “fourth Heisenberg uncertainty”, that of energy in relation to time. Wolfgang Pauli rejected the conjecture and even forecast the existence of a new and unknown then elementary particle, (...)
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  30. (1 other version)From Locke to Materialism: Empiricism, the Brain and the Stirrings of Ontology.Charles Wolfe - 2018 - In A. L. Rey S. Bodenmann (ed.), 18th-Century Empiricism and the Sciences.
    My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...)
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  31. Taking the Long View on Science, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science.Holly Andersen - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):169-174.
    Critical Notice for: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays. Edited by Matthew H. Slater and Zanja Yudell. Oxford University Press, 2017. x + 258 pp.
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  32. An Incomplete Inclusion of Non-cooperators into a Rawlsian Theory of Justice.Chong-Ming Lim - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (4):893-920.
    John Rawls’s use of the “fully cooperating assumption” has been criticized for hindering attempts to address the needs of disabled individuals, or non-cooperators. In response, philosophers sympathetic to Rawls’s project have extended his theory. I assess one such extension by Cynthia Stark, that proposes dropping Rawls’s assumption in the constitutional stage (of his four-stage sequence), and address the needs of non-cooperators via the social minimum. I defend Stark’s proposal against criticisms by Sophia Wong, Christie Hartley, and Elizabeth Edenberg and (...)
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  33. Jeremy Bentham, Deontologia, a cura di Sergio Cremaschi.Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi & Jeremy Bentham - 2000 - Scandicci (Firenze), Italy - Milano: La Nuova Italia - Rcs Scuola.
    This is the first Italian translation of Bentham’s “Deontology”. The translation goes with a rather extended apparatus meant to provide the reader with some information on Bentham’s ethical theory's own context. Some room is made for so-called forerunners of Utilitarianism, from the consequentialist-voluntarist theology of Leibniz, Malebranche, John Gay, Thomas Brown and William Paley to Locke and Hartley's incompatible associationist theories. After the theoretical context, also the real-world context is documented, from Bentham’s campaigns against the oppression of women and (...)
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  34. Political Liberalism and Male Supremacy.Cynthia A. Stark - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (5):873-880.
    In Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, Watson and Hartley dispute the claim that Rawls’s doctrine of political liberalism must tolerate gender hierarchy because it counts conservative and orthodox religions as reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I argue that their defense in fact contains two arguments, both of which fail. The first, which I call the “Deliberative Equality Argument”, fails because it does not establish conclusively that political liberalism’s demand for equal citizenship forbids social practices of domination, as the authors contend. The (...)
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  35. The Completeness: From Henkin's Proposition to Quantum Computer.Vasil Penchev - 2018 - Логико-Философские Штудии 16 (1-2):134-135.
    The paper addresses Leon Hen.kin's proposition as a " lighthouse", which can elucidate a vast territory of knowledge uniformly: logic, set theory, information theory, and quantum mechanics: Two strategies to infinity are equally relevant for it is as universal and t hus complete as open and thus incomplete. Henkin's, Godel's, Robert Jeroslow's, and Hartley Rogers' proposition are reformulated so that both completeness and incompleteness to be unified and thus reduced as a joint property of infinity and of all infinite (...)
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  36. The Unitarian Connection and Ricardo's Scientific Style.Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi & Marcelo Dascal - 2002 - History of Political Economy 34 (2):505-508.
    We reply to Philippe Depoortère’s paper “On Ricardo’s method: The Unitarian influence examined. Some comments on Cremaschi and Dascal’s article ‘Malthus and Ricardo on Economic Methodology’”. Depoortère asks two questions: (1) was Ricardo’s ‘conversion’ to Unitarianism sincere? (2) did Ricardo follow the methodologies of Priestley and Belsham? His answers are that he was a ‘religious skeptic’ and he was not an ‘empiricist’ like Priestley and Belsham. We reply that the sincerity of Ricardo’s religious beliefs is irrelevant since we start with (...)
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  37. Remaking the science of mind: Psychology as a natural science.Gary Hatfield - 1995 - In Christopher Fox, Roy Porter & Robert Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains. University of California Press. pp. 184–231.
    Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul, conceived as an animating power that included vital, sensory, and rational functions. C. Wolff restricted the term " psychology " to sensory, cognitive, and volitional functions and placed the science under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers (...)
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  38. Political liberalism and the justice claims of the disabled: a reconciliation.Gabriele Badano - 2014 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17 (4):401-422.
    Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundamental issues of justice are settled. The aim is to accommodate within public reason the due concern for the disabled (...)
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