Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)

The Architectonics of Meaning is a lucid demonstration of the purposes, methods, and implications of philosophical semantics that both supports and builds on Richard McKeon's and other noted pluralists' convictions that multiple philosophical approaches are viable. Watson ingeniously explores ways to systematize these approaches, and the result is a well-structured instrument for understanding texts. This book exemplifies both general and particular aspects of systematic pluralism, reorienting our understanding of the realms of knowing, doing, and making.

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

Contribución de eruditos autores sobre aspectos trascendentales de la teoría pura del derecho. Esta obra debe verse como una expresión de esa renovada ocupación con los problemas de la doctrina de Kelsen.

Are workers dominated? A recent suite of neo-republican and relational egalitarian philosophers think they are. Suppose they are right; that is, suppose that some workers are governed by an unjust and arbitrary power existing in labour relations, which persists even in the presence of the actual ability to exit. My question is this: does that give us reason to impose restrictions on firms? According to the so-called Efficiency Objection there are relevant trade-offs that need to be considered between the efficiency (...) of firms and the freedom of workers, and upon considering these trade-offs, we should reject workplace democracy. In this paper, I present a dilemma for the Efficiency Objection. I argue that either the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds or non-moral grounds; if the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds, then it fails because efficiency cannot be valued for its own sake (it is only instrumentally good); if the Efficiency Objection is justified on non-moral grounds, then it fails because of the respect that we owe to persons as persons; therefore, the Efficiency Objection fails. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

El profesor Robert Walter, el más eminente representante de la Teoría Pura del Derecho en nuestro tiempo, estudia en "Hans Kelsen, la Teoría Pura del Derecho y el problema de la justicia" y "Normas y enunciados sobre normas", los dos textos que componen esta obra, los puntos centrales del pensamiento filosófico y jurídico de Hans Kelsen.

Se resume en esta obra el vasto y complejo sistema teórico-jurídico de Hans Kelsen, el jurista más grande de nuestro siglo. La doctrina de Kelsen y en particular su Teoría Pura del Derecho han conocido muchas vicisitudes y ataques debidos más a prejuicios políticos y racistas que a una verdadera confrontación con sus tesis. El autor enfatiza en el hecho de que la doctrina jurídica de Kelsen no es una teoría terminada y archivada sino en permanente desarrollo, una teoría a (...) cuya ulterior construcción están convocados todos los juristas. (shrink)

This paper is both a survey and a review of the current state of the debate concerning verisimilitude. As a survey it is intended for the interested outsider who wants both easy access to and some comparison between the respective approaches. As a review it covers the first three books on the topic: those of Oddie. Niiniluoto and Kuipers.

David Brink presents a study of T. H. Green's classic Prolegomena to Ethics and its role in his philosophical thought. Green is one of the two most important figures in the British idealist tradition, and his political writings and activities had a profound influence on the development of Liberal politics in Britain. The Prolegomena is his major philosophical work. It begins with his idealist attack on empiricist metaphysics and epistemology and develops a perfectionist ethical theory that aims to bring together (...) the best elements in the ancient and modern traditions, and that provides the moral foundations for Green's own distinctive brand of liberalism. Brink aims to restore the Prolegomena to its rightful place in the history of philosophy by providing a prolegomenon to the Prolegomena - one that situates the work in its intellectual context, sympathetically but critically engages its main themes, and explains Green's enduring significance for the history of ethics and contemporary ethical theory. Brink examines Green's life and work, his idealist attack on empiricism, his conception of agency, his perfectionist ethics of self-realization, the connections he draws between perfectionism and the common good, his conception of the differences between perfectionism and utilitarianism, and the connections between his perfectionism and his defense of a new form of political liberalism. Because Green develops his own views out of an examination of other traditions in the history of ethics, a fair assessment of Green's own contributions must compare his claims with the traditions that he examines and sometimes criticizes. Brink's study examines Green's relation to Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Butler, Mill, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, and Sidgwick, and concludes by examining Green's legacy for ethical theory. Perfectionism and the Common Good will be of substantial interest to students and scholars of the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy. (shrink)

The transition from the Athenian Peripatos of Aristotle to the Alexandrian Museion of Callimachus has often attracted notice. So closely akin was the organization of scholarship in the two centres of learning, so definite was the personal connexion between the two, that it seemed possible to trace an uninterrupted line of succession from the older to the younger school. That Callimachus the scholar worked in the Aristotelian tradition appeared obvious: ‘he might be called a Peripatetic in the same sense as (...) his pupils, but with more justification’ (Wilamowitz,Hellenist. Dicht.i. 214). Regarding Callimachus the poet and literary critic the picture seemed less clear. The non-classical character of his poetry had often been emphasized, and cannot be overlooked. But quite recently an attempt has been made to turn Callimachus into an Aristotelian even by virtue of his literary criticism. The alleged harmony of this development rouses suspicion and calls for inquiry. In the following pages I have tried to collect and discuss what material I could find for the relation of Callimachus to Aristotle and his school. I hope to show that such influences as there were are of a different and more subtle nature, and that this poet, if any, was his own Longinus. (shrink)

Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This book is a collection of essays, mostly jointly authored, that support and apply evidentialism.

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition. Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of (...) the criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory. The final essay in this volume argues that evidentialism is uniquely well qualified to make sense of skepticism and to respond to its challenge. Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism. Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories. The essays included here respond to those attacks and raise objections to externalist theories, especially the principal rival, reliabilism. Internalism generally has been criticized for having unacceptable deontological implications, for failing to connect epistemic justification to truth, and for failing to provide an adequate account of what makes basic beliefs justified. Each of these charges is answered in these essays. The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and new afterwords to five of the reprinted essays; it will be the definitive resource on evidentialism for all epistemologists. (shrink)

An alarming number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that mind extends beyond the brain and body. This book evaluates these arguments and suggests that, typically, it does not. A timely and relevant study that exposes the need to develop a more sophisticated theory of cognition, while pointing to a bold new direction in exploring the nature of cognition Articulates and defends the “mark of the cognitive”, a common sense theory used to distinguish between cognitive and non-cognitive processes Challenges (...) the current popularity of extended cognition theory through critical analysis and by pointing out fallacies and shortcoming in the literature Stimulates discussions that will advance debate about the nature of cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This book is a systematic and constructive treatment of a number of traditional issues at the foundation of ethics, the possibility and nature of moral knowledge, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalistic world view, the nature of moral value and obligation, and the role of morality in a person's rational life plan. In striking contrast to many traditional authors and to other recent writers in the field, David Brink offers an integrated defense of (...) the objectivity of ethics. (shrink)

This volume collects David Lyons' well-known essays on Mill's moral theory and includes an introduction which relates the essays to prior and subsequent philosophical developments. Like the author's Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford, 1965), the essays apply analytical methods to issues in normative ethics. The first essay defends a refined version of the beneficiary theory of rights against H.L.A. Hart's important criticisms. The central set of essays develops new interpretations of Mill's moral theory with the aim of determining how (...) far rights can be incorporated in a utilitarian framework. They Mill's analysis of moral concepts promises to accommodate the argumentative force of rights, and also provide a significant new reading of Mill's theory of liberty. The last essay argues that the promise of Mill's theory of justice cannot be fulfilled. Utilitarianism is unable to account for crucial features of moral rights, or even for the moral force of legal rights whose existence might be justified on utilitarian grounds. (shrink)

The post-classical (or post-Avicennan, post-Rāzian) genre of the “protocols for dialectical inquiry and disputation” (ādāb al-baḥth wa-l-munāẓara) has its more proximate origins in the famed Risāla of Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 722/1322). The greater part of his conceptions and methodology, however, consists in a streamlining and universalizing of the more strictly juristic dialectic (jadal / khilāf) of his teacher Burhān al-Dīn al-Nasafī (d. 687/1288); and this in turn draws on the highly logicized dialectic of Rukn al-Dīn al-ʿAmīdī (d. 615/1218) and (...) his teacher Raḍī al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (d. 617/1220). At the heart of methods in this lineage, and carried forward by al-Samarqandī into the universal ādāb al-baḥth, are three truth-preserving logical relationships critical to the truth-seeking enterprise of dialectic: entailment (talāzum / mulāzama), mutual negation or exclusion (tanāfin / munāfā), and causal concomitance (dawarān). The practical elaboration of these relations reveals a logic in action—a premodern dialogical logic for living disputation praxis. In fact, so critical were these to the dialectical enterprise that al-Samarqandī devoted a specialized treatise entirely to summarizing their defining features and rules, aptly naming it the ʿAyn al-Naẓar, or “Wellspring of Rational Investigation.” In this article, and drawing upon a recently published digital critical edition, I will present an analytical outline of these core logical relations as presented in the ʿAyn al-Naẓar. Then I will address a number of points of interest in this text, grouped under six themes: the potential for cross-disciplinary advancement; notions in discursive development; significant or uniquely contributive formulations; peculiarities of content; signs of an evolving, universalist agenda; and evidence that the ʿAyn al-Naẓar was designed as an aide-mémoire for the active disputant. (shrink)

Brink analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. He argues that an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused, and that responsibility consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities, and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities.

This is an introduction to metaphysics for students and non-philosophers. (Philosophers: it's supposed to be the kind of book you can give to your friends and family, when they ask what you do for a living.) Contents: personal identity, fatalism, time, God, why not nothing?, free will, constitution, universals, necessity and possibility, what is metaphysics? (There is a second edition, which adds chapters on meta-metaphysics and the metaphysics of ethics.).

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools designed to help citizens decide how to vote. They typically offer their users a representation of what is at stake in an election by matching user preferences on issues with those of parties or candidates. While the use of VAAs has boomed in recent years in both established and new democracies, this new phenomenon in the electoral landscape has received little attention from political theorists. The current academic debate is focused on epistemic aspects (...) of the question how a VAA can adequately represent electoral politics. We argue that conceptual and normative presuppositions at play in the background of the tool are at least as important. Even a well-developed VAA does not simply reflect what is at stake in the election by neutrally passing along information. Rather, it structures political information in a way that is informed by the developers’ presuppositions. Yet, these presuppositions remain hidden if we interpret the tool as a mirror that offers the user a reflection of him/herself situated within the political landscape. VAAs should therefore be understood as electoral dioramas, staged according to a contestable picture of politics. (shrink)

The Dialectical Forge identifies dialectical disputation as a primary formative dynamic in the evolution of pre-modern Islamic legal systems, promoting dialectic from relative obscurity to a more appropriate position at the forefront of Islamic legal studies. The author introduces and develops a dialectics-based analytical method for the study of pre-modern Islamic legal argumentation, examines parallels and divergences between Aristotelian dialectic and early juridical jadal-theory, and proposes a multi-component paradigm—the Dialectical Forge Model—to account for the power of jadal in shaping Islamic (...) law and legal theory.In addition to overviews of current evolutionary narratives for Islamic legal theory and dialectic, and expositions on key texts, this work shines an analytical light upon the considerably sophisticated “proto-system” of juridical dialectical teaching and practice evident in Islam’s second century, several generations before the first “full-system” treatises of legal and dialectical theory were composed. This proto-system is revealed from analyses of dialectical sequences in the 2nd/8th century Kitāb Ikhtilāf al-ʿIrāqiyyīn / ʿIrāqiyyayn through a lens molded from 5th/11th century jadal-theory treatises. Specific features thus uncovered inform the elaboration of a Dialectical Forge Model, whose more general components and functions are explored in closing chapters. (shrink)

This essay explores a conception of responsibility at work in moral and criminal responsibility. Our conception draws on work in the compatibilist tradition that focuses on the choices of agents who are reasons-responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. Our conception brings together the dimensions of normative competence and situational control, and we factor normative (...) competence into cognitive and volitional capacities, which we treat as equally important to normative competence and responsibility. Normative competence and situational control can and should be understood as expressing a common concern that blame and punishment presuppose that the agent had a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This fair opportunity is the umbrella concept in our understanding of responsibility, one that explains it distinctive architecture. (shrink)

Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of (...) conscious subjects. I conclude by considering an externalist-friendly reworking of my proposal, but suggest that the success of such a reworking is dubious. (shrink)

SOME THINK THAT MORAL REALISTS CANNOT RECOGNIZE THE PRACTICAL OR ACTION-GUIDING CHARACTER OF MORALITY AND SO REJECT MORAL REALISM. THIS FORM OF ANTI-REALISM DEPENDS UPON AN INTERNALIST MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. BUT AN EXTERNALIST MORAL PSYCHOLOGY IS MORE PLAUSIBLE AND ALLOWS THE REALIST A SENSIBLE EXPLANATION OF THE ACTION-GUIDING CHARACTER OF MORALITY. CONSIDERATION OF THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF MORALITY, THEREFORE, DOES NOT UNDERMINE AND, INDEED, SUPPORTS MORAL REALISM.

David O. Brink offers a reconstruction and assessment of John Stuart Mill's contributions to the utilitarian and liberal traditions. Brink defends interpretations of key elements in Mill's moral and political thought, and shows how a perfectionist reading of his conception of happiness has a significant impact on other aspects of his philosophy.

It is common to regard love, friendship, and other associational ties to others as an important part of a happy or flourishing life. This would be easy enough to understand if we focused on friendships based on pleasure, or associations, such as business partnerships, predicated on mutual advantage. For then we could understand in a straightforward way how these interpersonal relationships would be valuable for someone involved in such relationships just insofar as they caused her pleasure or causally promoted her (...) own independent interests. But many who regard love, friendship, and other associational ties as an important part of a happy or flourishing life suppose that in many sorts of associations—especially intimate associations—the proper attitude among associates is concern for the other for the other's own sake, not just for the pleasure or benefits one can extract from one's associates. It is fairly clear how having friends of this sort is beneficial. What is less clear is how being a friend of this sort might contribute to one's own happiness or well-being. Even if we can explain this, it looks as if the contribution that friendship makes to one's happiness could not be the reason one has to care for friends, for that would seem to make one's concern for others instrumental, not a concern for the other for her own sake. (shrink)

Many arguments against naïve realism are arguments against its corollary: disjunctivism. But there is a simpler argument—due to Mehta —that targets naïve realism directly. In broad strokes, the argument is the following. There are certain experiences that are, allegedly, in no way phenomenally similar. Nevertheless, naïve realism predicts that they are phenomenally similar. Hence, naïve realism is false. Mehta and Ganson successfully defend this argument from an objection raised by French and Gomes :451–460, 2016). However, all parties to this dispute (...) have missed the real problem with Mehta’s argument. As I see it, the real problem is twofold. First, despite his claims to the contrary, the experiences Mehta cites are phenomenally similar. Moreover, finding experiences that are in no way phenomenally similar turns out to be a difficult task. Second, there are motivated versions of naïve realism that are immune to Mehta’s argument. The upshot is that even if Mehta’s argument is sound, the most that it can show is that one version of naïve realism is false. (shrink)