Jacob Weinrib's Dimensions of Dignity 1 [DD] joins a small but growing literature committed to the reconstruction, as applied theory, of foundational concepts such as justice, authority, and the ru...

Across the globe, the domain of the litigator and the judge has radically expanded, making it increasingly difficult for those who study comparative and international politics, public policy and regulation, or the evolution of new modes of governance to avoid encountering a great deal of law and courts. In On Law, Politics, and Judicialization, two of the world's leading political scientists present the best of their research, focusing on how to build and test a social science of law and courts. (...) The opening chapter features Shapiro's classic 'Political Jurisprudence,' and Stone Sweet's 'Judicialization and the Construction of Governance,' pieces that critically redefined research agendas on the politics of law and judging. Subsequent chapters take up diverse themes: the strategic contexts of litigation and judging; the discursive foundations of judicial power; the social logic of precedent and appeal; the networking of legal elites; the lawmaking dynamics of rights adjudication; the success and diffusion of constitutional review; the reciprocal impact of courts and legislatures; the globalization of private law; methods, hypothesis-testing, and prediction in comparative law; and the sources and consequences of the creeping 'judicialization of politics' around the world. Chosen empirical settings include the United States, the GATT-WTO, France and Germany, Imperial China and Islam, the European Union, and the transnational world of the Lex Mercatoria. Written for a broad, scholarly audience, the book is also recommended for use in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in law and the social sciences. (shrink)

The arbitral world is at a crucial point in its historical development, poised between two conflicting conceptions of its nature, purpose, and political legitimacy. Formally, the arbitrator is an agent of the contracting parties in dispute, a creature of a discrete contract gone wrong. Yet, increasingly, arbitrators are treated as agents of a larger global community, and arbitration houses concern themselves with the general and prospective impact of important awards. In this paper, I address these questions, first, from the standpoint (...) of delegation theory. In Part I, I introduce the basic “Principal-Agent" framework [P-A] used by social scientists to explain why actors create new institutions, and then briefly discuss how P-A has been applied to the study of courts. Part II uses delegation theory to frame discussion of arbitration as a mode of governance for transnational business and investment. In Part III, I argue that the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes is presently in the throes of judicialization, indicators of which include the enhanced use of precedent-based argumentation and justification, the acceptance of third-party briefs, and a flirtation with proportionality balancing. Part IV focuses on the first wave of awards rendered by ICSID tribunals pursuant to Argentina's response to the crushing economic crisis of 2000-02, wherein proportionality emerged, adapted from the jurisprudence of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization. (shrink)

In his analysis of the concept of causality, Hume finds that all events accounted causes and effects are contiguous and successive. No object can act efficaciously upon another so long as the objects are at a distance from each other. It may sometimes appear that “distant objects are productive of one another,” but on examination it is discovered that they are linked together by a series of intermediate causes which are contiguous among themselves; and even where examination does not directly (...) disclose the intermediate causal chain, it is still presumed that it exists. Also the cause is temporally prior to the effect. If I throw a stone through a window, the smashing of the glass follows the act of throwing the stone. It is only after the realization of the cause that the effect appears. Thus a cause is an object that is precedent to and contiguous with another object that is called the effect. (shrink)

I am deeply grateful to Nicole Roughan for overseeing this symposium and to Alon Harel, Stephen Riley, Julian Sempill, Alec Stone Sweet, and Ionna Tourkochoriti for their insightful engagements wit...

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

The fraught ideological relationship between liberalism and imperialism has been theorized primarily through the British, French, and American empires. This article moves beyond the experiences of these “great powers” by turning to Spain and its preeminent twentieth-century liberal thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. Unlike his British, French, and American counterparts, Ortega articulated liberalism not to promote or defend the forging of empire but rather to cope with the disorienting effects of its unequivocal loss in the wake of the Spanish–American War. (...) The experience of imperial loss, I argue, informed Ortega’s call for a “new liberalism” that could enable Spain’s national and cultural renewal. Reading Ortega’s thought in this context thus reveals the lasting impact that imperial dispossession can have upon certain strands of liberalism. It also suggests that, in order to fully capture the relationship between liberalism and empire, it is necessary to incorporate a wider range of historical sources and imperial trajectories. (shrink)

We are likely to have immersive virtual reality and ubiquitous augmented reality in the coming decades. At least some people will use extended reality or “the metaverse” to work, play and shop. In order to achieve the best possible versions of this virtual future, however, we will need to learn from three decades of regulating the Internet. The new virtual world cannot consist of walled corporate fiefdoms ruled only by profitmaximization. The interests of workers, consumers and citizens in virtuality require (...) proactive legislation and oversight. -/- This white paper first addresses the central question the metaverse poses, whether virtual life is inherently more alienating and less authentic than face-to-face life experiences. This question is both a philosophical question about the nature of the good life and an empirical question about the accumulating evidence about the impacts of the digital on subjective well-being. -/- . (shrink)

The moral justification for targeted killing turns on it being justified as an act of self-defense. That justification can be assessed by addressing five questions: Is the targeted person a threat who lacks the right to threaten? Has the targeted person forfeited some of her claim not to be killed? Even if the answer to the first two questions is positive, is targeted killing a necessary and proportionate response? Is the evidence in favor of targeted killing high enough to meet (...) the relevant standard of proof? And insofar as a person is selected for targeting from a larger group of possible targets, is the selection justifiable? The legal justifiability of targeted killing should aim to track, as much as problems of administrability and limiting unwanted effects allow, the answers to those moral questions. (shrink)

An autobiographical account of the liposome, from the perplexities of a blood smear to the growth of a multi‐million pound business.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to (...) anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. (shrink)

Isabel Paterson is the founding godmother of the libertarian movement, known best for her book The God of the Machine, which Ayn Rand credited for having done “for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity.” Often overlooked is her twenty-five-year career as a literary columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, edited by Stephen Cox, presents a selection of those columns along with private letters and other essays. They are a treasure. Paterson’s critical (...) performances show us a systematic yet unpredictable mind at work—a model not only of the first but also of any future libertarian worthy of the name. (shrink)

Philosophical Theory and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights examines the relations and interrelations among theoretical and practical analyses of human rights. Edited by William Sweet, this volume draws on the works of philosophers, political theorists and those involved in the implementation of human rights. The essays, although diverse in method and approach, collectively argue that the language of rights and corresponding legal and political instruments have an important place in contemporary social political philosophy.

Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of...

It may be argued that Joyce's work can be seen either as the defining text of a real and historically grounded nationhood or, conversely, as the defining text of an imaginary and ahistorical nationhood. It may in other words be viewed as either epical or Utopian—and as addressing a modernist predilection for either of those forms. But it may also be argued that Joyce's work might paradoxically be seen as both of these things and that Joyce's writing is able to (...) suspend and maintain such contradictory positions in a synthetic harmony through its uses of ambiguity and irony. Indeed, it might also be argued that Joyce herein offers the conditions of possibility of a realizable and sustainable mode of Utopianism—a .. (shrink)

When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that (...) insofar as representing practically just is knowing practically, it is equally acting intentionally. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...) Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

Idealism, Metaphysics and Community examines the place of idealism in contemporary philosophy, and its relation to problems of metaphysics, political thought, and the study of the history of philosophy. Drawing together contributions from philosophers from several distinct traditions, this book presents a range of perspectives - revealing areas of agreement and disagreement, addressing topics of contemporary discussion, and providing new insights into philosophical idealism. Following an extensive introduction by the editor, and drawing on the work of the Canadian idealist, Leslie (...) Armour, the book is divided into three main parts: Part 1 focuses on the British idealist, F.H.Bradley; Part 2 examines metaphysical issues and idealism, such as the realism/anti-realism debate, the relation of classical and idealist metaphysics, rational psychology, time and eternity, and the divine; Part 3 draws on idealism to address contemporary concerns in ethical theory, political philosophy, social philosophy and culture and the history of philosophy. Presenting new insights into the work of classical authors as well as contemporary philosophers, this book provides a better understanding of classical idealism and addresses important areas of contemporary philosophical, social and political concern. (shrink)

The corners of this world were marked by the rise and set points of the solstice sun.

The idea of 'holiness' is central to religion, but it is also one of the hardest concepts to define. Is 'holiness' a synonym for Godliness, one of God's attributes, or does it have independent existence? What does it mean to say that both God and man are holy? What is the proper understanding of 'Be holy, because I the Lord your God am holy'? A Theology of Holiness analyzes the meaning of the Hebrew root k-d-sh from ancient sources, throughout Tanakh, (...) the Talmud, Rashi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Ultimately, it is a work of theology, and helps the reader achieve a deeper understanding of holiness"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 245-258, March 2022.

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

This paper serves a dual function: (1) it is intended to proffer a stable understanding of our digital engagement on the Internet as a form of labor that is co-opted by digital firms for private profit; (2) it extends the concept of participatory democracy to our digital world, arguing that our collective or common production of value for digital firms (in the form of what I call“knowledge goods”) requires the implementation of participatory democratic governance mechanisms over these digital firms and (...) the experimentation with democratic digital alternatives.Whereas others have argued in favor of democratic control over digital platforms on the basis of the power that digital firms have over user's lives (Engelmann et al.,2020), this paper adds to this discussion by arguing in favor of digital platform democratization based on the value-generating labor contributed by digital users. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

Since the time of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, discussions of faith and reason have often pitted the believer against the skeptic, the theist against the atheist, and the person of one faith against the person of no professed faith. But the relation of reason to faith has been a matter of debate among believers as well. There are those who hold that religious faith can be proven or supported by rational argument. Others say that to try to give reasons (...) and arguments does violence to religious faith, or opens it to misunderstanding and doubt, or trivializes it. Responses to the Enlightenment: An Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community is a dialogue between Hendrik Hart and William Sweet, two philosophers who identify themselves as Christians, and who seek to respond to the challenges of the Enlightenment and its legacy. The authors approach the relation of faith to reason, however, in very different ways: Hart from the perspective of the Calvinian tradition and postmodern philosophy, Sweet from the Catholic tradition and analytic philosophy. Among the topics discussed are the nature of religious faith and of reason, liberalism and orthodoxy in religion, the relation of religious experience and rationality, and building community in a religiously and culturally pluralistic world. This exchange presents two distinctive perspectives to some of the major challenges of the reason to religious belief, but seeks to find common ground between them. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

In Kant on Practical Life: From Duty to History, Kristi E. Sweet accepts Allen Wood’s challenge to present in a single book the entire arc of Kant’s practical philosophy, including both its a priori and empirical aspects, literally from duty to history. Others have successfully undertaken a similar task, notably Robert Louden in Kant’s Impure Ethics, but Sweet succeeds in fulfilling three further distinctive aims: settling persistent but outdated contentions that Kant’s ‘deontological’ and ‘teleological’ commitments are inconsistent by (...) tracing duty through to the ends it entails, especially the communal ends “in which reason finds its satisfaction” (10); addressing the problem of human finitude by explicating and resolving the dialectic between reason and nature in its various moments; and leaving virtually no philosophical stone unturned along the way, from the fact of reason to international disarmament. (shrink)