This paper is about avoiding commitment to an ontology of possible worlds with two primitives: a hyperintensional connective like ‘in virtue of’, and primitive quantification into predicate position. I argue that these tools (which some believe can be independently motivated) render dispensable the ontology of possible worlds needed by traditional anaylses of modality. They also shed new light on the notion of truth-at-a-world.

"Wokini, " translated from Lakota, means "seeking a new beginning." On that theme, the famous athlete joins the bestselling author to blend modern therapeutic principles and Native American tradition.

This book gives an account of a full spectrum of property rights and their relationship to individual liberty. It shows that a purely deontological approach to justice can deal with the most complex questions regarding the property system. Moreover, the author considers the economic, ecological, and technological complexities of our real-world property systems. The result is a more conceptually sound account of natural rights and the property system they demand. If we think that liberty should be at the centre of (...) justice, what does that mean for the property system? Economists and lawyers widely agree that a property system must be composed of many different types of property: the kind of private ownership one has over one's person and immediate possessions, as well as the kinds of common ownership we each have in our local streets, as well as many more. However, theories of property and justice have not given anything approaching an adequate account of the relationship between liberty and any other form of property other than private ownership. It is often thought that a basic commitment to liberty cannot really tell us how to arrange the major complexities of the property system, which diverge from simple private ownership. Property and Justice demonstrates how philosophical rigour coupled with interdisciplinary engagement enables us to think clearly about how to deal with real-world problems. It will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, and legal theorists working on property rights and justice. (shrink)

Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common (...) property arrangements be converted to privatized units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner argues that a necessary and sufficient condition for the compossibility of a set of rights is that those rights be extensionally differentiable. However, given that two or more actions can extensionally overlap without thereby being mutually unperformable, if such actions are specified in the relevant rights, then those rights will not be incompossible, notwithstanding their extensional overlap. The set of compossible sets of rights then is greater than the subset of extensionally differentiable rights, and extensional differentiability is a (...) sufficient but unnecessary condition of compossibility. (shrink)

Over the centuries the term “talent” has changed semantically and slowly transformed itself into a floating signifier or become an accidental designator. The term “talent” no longer has one single meaning and a “referent” in real life, but instead a multiplicity of meaning and references to something beyond real life, something indefinite and indefinable. In other words, today we do not know specifically what the term “talent” in talent management really means or refers to. Indeed, this is problematical, because in (...) late modernity the term “talent” has become a popular and frequently used key term among business consultants and, within the science of human resource management, a cornerstone in the discipline of “talent management”, and not knowing what the term really means will turn any talent discussion, talent identification and talent recruitment into a question of subjectivity and belief in talent rather than objectivity and knowledge of talent. (shrink)

This edited collection offers a critical appreciation of talent management in contrast to the extensive literature adopting mainstream approaches to the topic. The authors explore fundamental questions in the field to better understand why managing talent seems so attractive as a management practice, the meaning of talent, and how talent is recognised in organisations. The mix of conceptual and empirical chapters in the book teases out some critical perspectives that will provoke thought and reflection among practitioners and stimulate ideas for (...) new research topics and approaches. The diverse contributions presented in this book will undoubtedly be of use to academics, practitioners and postgraduate students of human resource management. (shrink)

Many libertarians ground their theory of justice in a non-aggression principle. The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a (...) satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment to non-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach. (shrink)

Ben Bryan argues that the strongest challenge to natural rights theory is to explain how it overcomes the Problem of Authority. Given that our natural rights are multiply realisable by a range of equally reasonable social conventions, how or why ought one particular realisation have authority? I argue that Thomistic and Kantian solutions to this problem do not count as solutions from natural rights theory, and therefore offer my own solution. When theories of natural rights describe the rights we have (...) in terms that refer not only to moralised act-types, but rather, tell us which non-moralised act-types ought to be moralised in the relevant way, they avoid the Problem of Authority altogether. Such theories of natural rights are singularly realisable at the level of regulative conventional rules, and only multiply realisable at the level of constitutive conventional rules. The latter form of multiple realisability does not raise the Problem of Authority. (shrink)

This essay examines whether or not absurdity is intrinsic to human life. It takes Camus’ interpretation of ‘The Absurd’ as its conceptual starting point. It traces such thought back to Schopenhauer, whose work is then critically analysed. This analysis focuses primarily on happiness and meaning. This essay accepts some of Schopenhauer’s premises, but rejects his conclusions. Instead, it considers Nietzsche’s alternatives and the role of suffering in life. It posits that suffering may help people acquire meaning and escape absurdity. It (...) then analyses the role of compassion in absurdity, in reference to Nietzsche’s work and Buddhist teachings. Lastly, it examines absurdity in relation to death, rejecting the notion that death exacerbates absurdity. This paper understands absurdity to be a natural part of the human condition, as characterised by suffering, death and an absence of meaning. It concludes that although human life is absurd by nature, it need not remain so. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene por objeto destacar la relevancia de una noción de “muerte impersonal” en el horizonte de una indagación no antropocentrada de lo biopolítico. En tanto no se rige por la teleología del principio antrópico, la filosofía contemporánea considera lo impersonal como una resistencia al biopoder, aunque suele concentrarse en los avatares del concepto de Vida. Aquí, avanzamos en el examen de los rasgos de la muerte impersonal en dos pensadores cuyas obras resultan fundamentales para estas líneas de trabajo (...) contemporáneas. En Nietzsche, analizamos la cuestión de la “muerte libre” y la imagen de la ceniza, dando cuenta de las posibilidades que allí se vislumbran para una reivindicación de lo impersonal. Luego, subrayamos sus semejanzas y derivaciones en los conceptos blanchotianos de “momento deseado” y “tiempo muerto”. (shrink)

Resumen: A mediados del siglo XX, Blanchot elabora una crítica minuciosa de algunos tópicos de Camus. Su interés, sobre todo, se centra en la renovación camusiana del cogito sintetizada en la fórmula Me rebelo, luego somos. Para Blanchot, el hombre desgraciado ha perdido el poder de decir “Yo” y, por ello, es una figura de lo impersonal que no puede ser reconducida a la persona. Sin embargo, esto no implica la renuncia a la insumisión: Blanchot recupera la figura de Sísifo (...) para mostrar que hay una rebeldía de lo impersonal que excede al hombre, marcando así el camino a la “resistencia de lo neutro” que sería reivindicada por la filosofía francesa e italiana del siglo XXI.: In the mid-20th century, Blanchot developed a thorough critique of some of Camus’ topics. His interest mainly focused on the renewal of the camusian cogito synthesized in the formula “I rebel, therefore we are.” For Blanchot, the hapless man has lost the power to say “I” and is thus a figure of the impersonal that cannot be redirected to the person. Nevertheless, this does not entail a waiver of rebelliousness: Blanchot recovered the figure of Sisyphus to show that there is a rebellion of the impersonal that exceeds man, indicating the way to the “resistance of the neutral” to be claimed by French and Italian philosophy of the 21st century. (shrink)

Through Blanchot’s and Derrida’s reading of Artaud’s work, this article argues that an anthropic decentering of writing enables the redefinition of a non-dialectical and nonsubstantial materialism which does justice to the impersonal and organoleptic character of art, given that it does not reduce it to the human representative horizon. The conceptual path we follow intends to point out that Blanchot and Derrida retrieve a certain logic from Artaud’s works which implies a reconfiguration of the notion of surface and concomitantly forces (...) a new ontological and aesthetic approach. The latter reveals the need to maintain a distance from the modern horizon in order to offer a space for the materials’ inorganic power without depriving it of animation and, at the same time, to vindicate the living without yielding it to human requirements. (shrink)

Over the last few decades climate change has been gaining importance in international scientific and political debates. However, the social sciences, especially in Latin America, have only lately become interested in the subject and their approach is still vague. Scientific understanding of global environmental change and the process of designing public policies to face them are characterized by their complexity as well as by epistemic and normative uncertainties. This makes it necessary to problematize the way in which research efforts understand (...) ‘the social’ of climate change. How do ‘the climate’ and ‘the social’ interpenetrate as scientific objects? What does the resulting field look like? Is the combination capable of promoting reflexivity and collaboration on the issue, or does it merely become dispersed with diffuse boundaries? Our paper seeks to answer these and other related questions using Chile as a case study and examining peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic. By combining in-depth qualitative content analysis of each paper with a statistical meta-analysis, we were able to: characterize the key content and forms of such literature; identify divisions and patterns within it; and, discuss some factors and trends that may help explain these. We conclude that the literature displays two competing trends: while it is inclined to become fragmented beyond the scope of the ‘mitigation’ black box, it also tends to cluster along the lines of methodological distinctions traditionally contested within the social sciences. This, in turn, highlights the persistence of disciplinary divisions within an allegedly interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Miller’s recent claim that 1) the ideal of value-freedom is implausible because evidence from experimental psychology reveals how scientific reasoning is val...

Billy Dunaway develops and defends a framework for realism about morality. He defends the idea that moral properties are privileged parts of reality which are the referents for our moral terms. He suggests how it is that we can know about morality, and what the limits to moral disagreement are.

We are becoming increasingly dependent on robots and other forms of artificial intelligence for our beliefs. But how should the knowledge gained from the “say-so” of a robot be classified? Should it be understood as testimonial knowledge, similar to knowledge gained in conversation with another person? Or should it be understood as a form of instrument-based knowledge, such as that gained from a calculator or a sundial? There is more at stake here than terminology, for how we treat objects as (...) sources of knowledge often has important social and legal consequences. In this paper, I argue that at least some robots are capable of testimony. I make my argument by exploring the differences between instruments and testifiers on a well-known account of knowledge: reliabilism. On this approach, I claim that the difference between instruments and testifiers as sources of knowledge is that only the latter are capable of deception. As some robots can be designed to deceive, so they too should be recognized as testimonial sources of knowledge. (shrink)