Machine generated contents note: W. G. COLLINGWOOD Letters from Iceland: introduced by Janet Gnosspelius -- GUIDO VANHEESWIJCK R. G. Collingwood, T. S. Elliot and the Romantic Tradition -- MARNIE HUGHES- History, Education and the Conversation of Mankind -- WARRINGTON --K. B. McINTYRE Collingwood, Oakeshott and the Social Contract -- LIONEL RUBINOFF The Relation Between Philosophy and History in the Thought of R G. Collingwood -- COLLINGWOOD CORNER -- BENEDETTO CROCE In Commemoration of an English Friend, a Companion in Thought and (...) Faith, R. G. Collingwood (translated -- by Lionel Rubinoff and Alan Franklin) -- BENEDETTO CROCE Review of R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (translated by Lionel Rubinoff and Alan Franklin) -- R. G. COLLINGWOOD Aesthethic and the Mind, introduced by -- James Connelly -- GRACE SIMPSON Collingwood's Philosophy of History: Observations of an Archaeologist -- REVIEWS -- Cameron Wybrow (ed.), Creation, Nature, and Political Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster, reviewed by -- James Connelly. (shrink)

This paper explores the rhetoric of obstetric ultrasound technology as it relates to the abortion debate, specifically the interpretation given to ultrasound images by opponents of abortion. The tenor of the anti-abortion approach is precisely captured in the videotape, Ultrasound:A Window to the Womb. Aspects of this videotape are analyzed in order to tease out the assumptions about the (female) body and about the access to truth yielded by scientific technology (ultrasound) held by militant opponents of abortion. It is argued (...) that the ultrasound images do not offer transparent confirmation of the ontological status of the embryo and fetus. Rather, the window of ultrasound is constructed through a complex combination of visual and verbal devices: ultrasound images, photographic images, verbal argument, and emotional appeal. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn had little to say about scientific change in biological science, and biologists are ambivalent about how applicable his framework is for their disciplines. We apply Kuhn’s account of paradigm change to evolutionary microbiology, where key Darwinian tenets are being challenged by two decades of findings from molecular phylogenetics. The chief culprit is lateral gene transfer, which undermines the role of vertical descent and the representation of evolutionary history as a tree of life. To assess Kuhn’s relevance to this (...) controversy, we add a social analysis of the scientists involved to the historical and philosophical debates. We conclude that while Kuhn’s account may capture aspects of the pattern of an episode of scientific change, he has little to say about how the process of generating new understandings is occurring in evolutionary microbiology. Once Kuhn’s application is limited to that of an initial investigative probe into how scientific problem-solving occurs, his disciplinary scope becomes broader. (shrink)

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

Première introduction au séminaire de 1978-1979 de Michel Foucault au Collège de France. Depuis la mort de Michel Foucault en 1984, de nombreuses exégèses ou critiques de sa pensée ont été écrites. La publication en 1999 de Dits et Ecrits a suscité de nouvelles interprétations des textes de Foucault mettant son travail en perspective. Ainsi de l'éthique et de la biopolitique. Cependant à isoler éthique et biopolitique, on risquerait de ne pas prendre la mesure de l'apport de Foucault. Peut-on en (...) effet rendre autonomes l'éthique et la question de la subjectivation d'une philosophie politique? Peut-on comprendre le concept de biopolitique sans le relier à sa réflexion sur le libéralisme? La biopolitique, selon Foucault, est la technologie politique du libéralisme naissant. Elle vise à améliorer ses performances jusqu'au déclin de sa raison d'être. Un libéralisme sans liberté interroge l'obstination avec laquelle Foucault tente de proposer de nouvelles catégories de philosophie politique qui ne soient pas l'exclusive d'une philosophie du pouvoir. En effet, l'introduction du terme de libéralisme est concomitante de la création de concepts comme ceux de biopolitique, de gouvernementalité. L'instauration de ces notions est complexe car elle renvoie à une lecture inédite du libéralisme qui n'est pas considérée comme une doctrine, ni comme une construction d'un système dont la liberté serait le centre, non plus qu'un idéal politique, voire une idéologie dominante. Pour Foucault, il s'agit d'une effectuation d'un type de rationalité qui met en œuvre une technologie politique spécifique. (shrink)

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In (...) Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals. (shrink)

In Zizek and Politics, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe go beyond standard introductions to spell out a new approach to reading Zizek, one that can be highly critical as well as deeply appreciative. They show that Zizek has a raft of fundamental positions that enable his theoretical positions to be put to work on practical problems. Explaining these positions with clear examples, they outline why Zizek's confrontation with thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze has so radically changed how we (...) think about society. They then go on to track Zizek's own intellectual development during the last twenty years, as he has grappled with theoretical problems and the political climate of the War on Terror. This book is a major addition to the literature on Zizek and a crucial critical introduction to his thought. (shrink)

The British idealists made significant and lasting contributions to the social and political thought of the nineteenth century. They contributed to the evolution debate in insisting that the social organism could not be understood in naturalistic terms, but instead had to be conceived as an evolving spiritual unity. In this respect the British idealists developed a distinctive view of the state constitutive of the individual and they are commonly acknowledged as the forerunners of modern communitarian theory. Furthermore the idealists contributed (...) to the major debates of their day, including evolution, democracy, the role of the state, education and international relations. In his introduction, David Boucher develops the themes illustrated in the writings of the British idealists. This volume also contains biographies of the British idealists which incorporate their principal works. (shrink)

What is the place of language in human cognition? Do we sometimes think in natural language? Or is language for purposes of interpersonal communication only? Although these questions have been much debated in the past, they have almost dropped from sight in recent decades amongst those interested in the cognitive sciences. Language and Thought is intended to persuade such people to think again. It brings together essays by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers and psychologists, who discuss various ways in (...) which language may be implicated in human cognition. The editors have provided an introduction which lays out the basic terms and history of the debate, and a consolidated bibliography which will provide a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in language and its place in cognition. (shrink)

The concept of voluntariness permeates the ethics and politics of migration and is commonly used to distinguish refugees from migrants. Yet, neither the precise nature and conditions of voluntariness nor its ethical significance for migrant rights and state obligations has received enough attention. The articles in this collection move the debate forward by demonstrating the complex ethical judgments involved in delineating voluntary from forced migration and in drawing out its political and institutional implications. In addition to highlighting the interplay between (...) the voluntary and nonvoluntary elements of migration over time and across different sites of the migration journey, they provide a nuanced account of the various conditions of voluntariness and they challenge common ideas about its normative political consequences. (shrink)

Mutation and lateral transfer are two categories of processes generating genetic diversity in prokaryotic genomes. Their relative importance varies between lineages, yet both are complementary rather than independent, separable evolutionary forces. The replication process inevitably merges together their effects on the genome. We develop the concept of “open lineages” to characterize evolutionary lineages that over time accumulate more changes in their genomes by lateral transfer than by mutation. They contrast with “closed lineages,” in which most of the changes are caused (...) by mutation. Open and closed lineages are interspersed along the branches of any tree of prokaryotes. This patchy distribution conflicts with the basic assumptions of traditional phylogenetic approaches. As a result, a tree representation including both open and closed lineages is a misrepresentation. The evolution of all prokaryotic lineages cannot be studied under a single model unless new phylogenetic approaches that are more pluralistic about lineage evolution are designed. (shrink)

The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan is justly renowned as a powerful visual advertisement for his political philosophy. Consequently, its rich imagery has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary. Surprisingly, then, its gendered dimensions have received relatively limited attention. This essay explores this neglected facet of the frontispiece. I argue that the image initially appears to present a hypermasculine sovereign. However, upon closer inspection, and considered alongside Hobbes's economic theory, it yields to a reading of the sovereign as an ambiguously (...) gendered figure. Reading the frontispiece through the prism of gender and the economy reveals not a static image of unwavering male power but rather one of an equivocally-sexed creature teeming with life, contradictions, and complexities worthy of continued examination. (shrink)

How people learn chunks or associations between adjacent items in sequences was modelled. Two previously successful models of how people learn artificial grammars were contrasted: the CCN, a network version of the competitive chunker of Servan‐Schreiber and Anderson [J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 16 (1990) 592], which produces local and compositionally‐structured chunk representations acquired incrementally; and the simple recurrent network (SRN) of Elman [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179], which acquires distributed representations through error correction. The models' susceptibility to two (...) types of interference was determined: prediction conflicts, in which a given letter can predict two other letters that appear next with an unequal frequency; and retroactive interference, in which the prediction made by a letter changes in the second half of training. The predictions of the models were determined by exploring parameter space and seeing howdensely different regions of the space of possible experimental outcomes were populated by model outcomes. For both types of interference, human data fell squarely in regions characteristic of CCN performance but not characteristic of SRN performance. (shrink)

I consider the broad perspectives in biology known as ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’, as well as a modern version of functionalism, ‘adaptationism’. I do not take a position on which of these perspectives is preferable; my concern is with the prior question, how should they be understood? Adapting van Fraassen’s argument for treating materialism as a stance, rather than a factual belief with propositional content, in the first part of the paper I offer an argument for construing functionalism and structuralism as (...) stances also. The argument draws especially on Gould’s insights concerning functionalism and structuralism, in particular their apparent historical continuity from the pre-Darwinian period through to today. In the second part of the paper I consider Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between empirical and explanatory adaptationism, and suggest that while the former is an empirical scientific hypothesis, the latter is closely related to the functionalist stance. (shrink)

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the (...) Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticize Boer’s valorization of theology as a practical discourse that is postideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative. (shrink)

In ubiquitous surveillance societies, individuals are subjected to observation and control by authorities, institutions, and corporations. Sometimes, citizens contribute their own knowledge and other resources to their own surveillance. In addition, some of “the watched” observe “the watchers” “through” sous‐veillant activities, and various forms of self-surveillance for different purposes. However, information and communication technologies are also increasingly used for social initiatives with a bottom up structure where citizens themselves define the goals, shape the outcomes and profit from the benefits of (...) watching activities. This model, which we define as citizens’ veillance and explore in this special issue, may present opportunities for individuals and collectives to be more prepared to meet the challenges they face in various domains including environment, health, planning and emergency response. (shrink)

Van Fraassen has argued that many philosophical positions should be understood as stances rather than factual beliefs. In this paper I discuss the vexed question of whether and how such stances can be rationally justified. Until this question has been satisfactorily answered, the otherwise promising stance approach cannot be considered a viable metaphilosophical option. One can find hints, and the beginnings of an answer to this question, in van Fraassen’s (and others’) writings, but no general, fully clear and convincing account (...) has been offered. I aim to provide such an account. In the first section I introduce the concept of a stance. In the second section I argue that stances may be justified pragmatically, in terms of both their epistemic fruits, and their coherence with values. In the third section I further consider the relationship between stances and values, arguing that the value-ladenness of a stance does not render it immune to rational scrutiny. In the final section I look at van Fraassen’s version of epistemological voluntarism, which plays a central role in his conception of the basis on which a stance may be rationally adopted. I show that voluntarism provides a theoretical framework, and approach to epistemology, within which the forms of justification appropriate to stance choice I outline in sections 2 and 3 find a natural home. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a noticeable yet largely unacknowledged ‘pragmatic turn’ in the scientific realism debate, inspired in part by van Fraassen’s work on ‘epistemic stances’. Features of this new approach include: an ascent to the meta-level (the focus is not so much on whether scientific realism is true, but on the prior questions of the nature of the positions in this debate, how to decide whether to be a scientific realist, etc.); a reinterpretation of scientific realism and (...) anti-realism as (or as closely associated with) stances or frameworks, rather than theories or beliefs; a move away from the previously dominant empirical-explanatory (i.e. quasi-scientific or naturalistic) conception of scientific realism, anti-realism, and their justification; and a stress on the pragmatic and values-based elements in the debate. The traditional scientific realism debate is concerned with determining which position is true, or most epistemically justified. The new approach by contrast is concerned with determining which position best serves certain values, e.g. is most useful, fruitful, or otherwise prudentially preferable. In this paper we try to bring together the various strands in this new orientation, summarise its key features, contrast it with superficially similar but opposing views, and explore the similarities and differences among some of its adherents. Given we are advocates of the turn, we also offer a defence of the value and fruitfulness of this reconceptualization of the debate. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould’s views on the ontology of species were an important plank of his revisionist program in evolutionary theory. In this paper I cast a critical philosopher’s eye over those views. I focus on three central aspects of Gould’s views on species: the relation between the Darwinian and the metaphysical notions of individuality, the relation between the ontology of species and macroevolution, and the issue of contextualism and conventionalism about the metaphysics of species.

Creationists have long argued that evolutionary science is committed to a dogmatic metaphysics of naturalism and materialism, which is based on faith or ideology rather than evidence. The standard response to this has been to insist that science is not committed to any such metaphysical doctrine, but only to a methodological version of naturalism, according to which science may only appeal to natural entities and processes. But this whole debate presupposes that there is a clear distinction between the natural and (...) the supernatural, and thus that naturalism is a meaningful doctrine. I argue that this assumption is false. The concepts of the natural and the supernatural are in fact hopelessly obscure, such that the claim that science is committed to methodological naturalism cannot be made good. This is no victory for anti-naturalists however; explicitly supernaturalist theories, such as Creationism, can be ruled out of scientific consideration as a priori incoherent, given that they presuppose for their intelligibility that there is a meaningful natural-supernatural distinction. This is not the case for standard scientific theories however, as they are not explicitly naturalistic theories; they do not postulate natural or physical entities or processes as such. (shrink)

I consider two attempts to combine realism with pluralism about the units of selection: Sober and Wilson’s combination of “model” and “unit” pluralism, and Sterelny and Griffiths’ “local pluralism”. I argue that both of these attempts fail to show that realism and pluralism are compatible. Sober and Wilson’s pluralism turns out, on closer inspection, to be a kind of monism in disguise, while Sterelny and Griffiths’ local pluralism involves a combination of realism and anti-realism about interactors, and the units of (...) selection, that is fundamentally unstable. My conclusion is that one must choose whether to be a realist or a pluralist in this area: one cannot be both. The question of which we should choose is a further question that I do not take a stand on. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Significance of R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of HistoryDavid BoucherThe Principles of History is the work that Collingwood saw as his principal philosophical enterprise, the book for which his whole intellectual life had been a preparation. It was to have been a work divided into three books. 1 In the first there was to be a discussion of the characteristics that make the special science of history distinctive. In (...) the second history was to be compared with other sciences. Third, he intended to investigate the relationship between history and practical life. He thought of beginning his project by giving a brief account of the different senses of the concept of history. Book one was divided into four chapters. The first was to concentrate on evidence and testimony relating them to scissors-and-paste history. Chapter two was to present a theory of action, res gestae, or action expressive of thought, in contrast with the idea of process, or change, associated with pseudo-history. In chapter three reenactment was to be discussed and contrasted with the idea of a dead past. Chapter four was to argue that history in contrast with other purported pretenders to the title can justifiably claim to be the science of the mind. Book two was divided into three chapters. Chapter one was to discuss history and natural science, showing that neither could be reduced to each other. He also wanted to contend that the natural sciences are themselves historical achievements in that they depend upon the historical facts of observation and thought. Chapter two was to deal with history and the human sciences, such as economics, which he describes as crypto-histories. In the third chapter Collingwood intended to explore the relation between history and philosophy. In book three, which is described less precisely, he wanted to argue that history overcomes the distinction between theory and practice, and that reenactment overcomes the dualism between mind and its objects. This, he thought, would enable him to give a characterization of historical morality and historical civilization in contrast with their utilitarian counterparts.He began writing the book on 15 February 1939 and had finished the first three chapters by 23 February. Over a month later, on 26 and 27 March, he began chapter four but was unable to formulate his thoughts on the past, and the relation between history and philosophy. At this point he stopped, never to return to the manuscript again. What we have left of The Principles of History deviates considerably from the original plan. Only three chapters were written, the third of which does not contain the crucial discussion of re-enactment. In addition, uncompleted fragments of the beginnings of a fourth chapter remain.In this paper I intend to look at why Collingwood’s explicit authorization to publish the Principles of History was disregarded by Knox and Oxford University Press. In addition, I want to look at three aspects of the rediscovered manuscript. In the second and third sections, on the method and subject matter of history respectively, I examine the extent to which Knox’s suppression of the Principles of History contributed to a good deal of the confusion surrounding the interpretation of Collingwood’s key ideas. What emerges from the pages of the Principles of History is how integral The Principles of Art and An Essay on Metaphysics are to understanding Collingwood’s later philosophy of history, a connection that is distorted by the patchwork nature of The Idea of History.In the fourth section of the paper I suggest that the most significant omission to which Collingwood never returned was the theory of reenactment. Reenactment more than any other aspect of his writings has been placed by interpreters at the centre of Collingwood’s philosophy of history. W. H. Dray’s new book is wholly focused upon this theme. Dray did not, however, see The Principles of History in time to incorporate the implications for reenactment theory of Collingwood’s broadening of the subject matter of history to include the emotions. 2 The theory of reenactment could no longer be sustained by the earlier argument found in The Idea of History, because Collingwood, in The Principles of... (shrink)

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We (...) believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments seek to infer from the evolutionary origin of human beliefs about a particular domain to the conclusion that those beliefs are unjustified. In this paper I discuss EDAs with respect to our everyday, commonsense beliefs. Those who seriously entertain EDAs for commonsense argue that natural selection does not care about truth, it only cares about fitness, and thus it will equip us with beliefs that are useful rather than true. In recent work Griffiths and Wilkins argue that (...) this is a mistake. Fitness-tracking and truth-tracking are not rival, but rather potentially complementary, hypotheses about the function of our cognitive belief-forming systems. It may be that those systems maximise fitness by tracking the truth. I argue that while they are right about the standard EDAs for commonsense, the threat of evolutionary scepticism remains, because cognitive systems whose function is to track the truth may still be highly unreliable. I propose an alternative, Moorean approach to vindicating our commonsense picture of the world and dispelling the threat of scepticism. Once this has been established, however, we may appeal to evolution to explain the good fit between our cognition and the world. I thus propose that an evolutionary explanatory project ought to replace the troubled evolutionary justificatory project. This ought to be appealing to those such as Griffiths and Wilkins who seek a naturalistic non-sceptical account of our commonsense beliefs and their origins. (shrink)

In this article I intend to give more attention to Pufendorf's ideas than has been the custom among international relations theorists. The main focus will be upon Pufendorf's distillation and conceptualization of the implications of Westphalia in terms of sovereignty and the integrity of states. Furthermore, his extension of the Aristotelian classification of types of state, and his attempts to go beyond Bodin's and Hobbes's theories of sovereignty, provide the vocabulary and concepts in terms of which the different international actors (...) of the late seventeenth century could be understood. In this respect the focus is altogether different from Linklater. My emphasis upon the historical and emblematic character of the Peace of Westphalia, the personification of the state and its animation by sovereignty, which serves to facilitate Pufendorf's exploration of the idea of a system of states, and my suggestion that his ideas are not wholly redundant and may be used to explore some facets of a modern states system, serve considerably to extend Forsyth's brief analysis. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore in what respects Thomas Hobbes may be regarded as foundational in international thought. It is evident that in contemporary international relations theory he has become emblematic of a realist tradition, but as David Armitage suggests this was not always the case. I want to suggest that it is only in a very limited sense that he may be regarded as a foundational thinker in international relations, and for reasons very different from those (...) for which he has become infamous. In the early histories of international thought Hobbes is a cameo figure completely eclipsed by Grotius. In early histories of political literature, the classic jurists were often acknowledged for their remarkable contributions to international relations, but Hobbes is referred to exclusively as a philosopher of a positvist ethics and absolute sovereignty. It is among the jurists themselves that Hobbes is believed to have made important conceptual moves which set the problems for international thought for the next three centuries. He conflates natural law and the law of nations, arguing that they differ only in their subjects—the former individuals, the latter nations or states. This entailed transforming the sovereign into an artificial man, not in the Roman Law sense of an entity capable of suing and being sued; rather, as a subject not party to a contract, but created by a contract among individuals who confer upon it authority. This subject is not constrained by the contractors, but is, as individuals were in the state of nature, constrained by the equivalent of natural law, the law of nations in the international context. Throughout, the methodological implications are drawn for modern historians of political thought and political philosophers who venture to theorise about international relations. (shrink)

Introduction History, Historicism and Hermeneutics In the Phaedrus Socrates argues that the written word is far inferior to the spoken word as a means of..

The article introduces a special issue on “Rethinking Liberal Multiculturalism: Foundations, Practices and Methodologies.” The contributions presented in this special issue were discussed during the conference « Multicultural Citizenship 25 Years Later », held in Paris in November 2021. Their aim is to take stock of the legacy of Kymlicka’s contribution and to highlight new developments in theories of liberal multiculturalism and minority rights. The contributions do not purport to challenge the legitimacy of theories of multiculturalism and minority rights, they (...) rather aim at deepening our understanding of the foundations of liberal multiculturalism and of its practical implementation, sensitive to social scientific dynamics of diverse societies. Without abandoning the general idea that cultural minorities should be granted special minority rights, the essays presented raise new questions about three dimensions central to liberal multiculturalism: its normative foundations, its practical categories of minorities or groups, and its fact-sensitive methodology. Taken together they shed light on the renewed variety of theories of liberal multiculturalism highlighting their complexity and internal disagreements. To introduce these articles, the article first draws a brief historical overview of the debates on multiculturalism since the 1990s (section 1). It then highlights the distinctive aspects of Kymlicka’s contribution (section 2) and identifies recent research trends (section 3). Doing so, it explains how the articles gathered here both expand on those distinctive aspects and explore those new research avenues. The section 4 summarizes the contributions. (shrink)

Van Fraassen’s view that many philosophical positions should be understood as stances rather than factual beliefs with propositional content, has become increasingly popular. But the precise relation between a philosophical stance, and the factual beliefs that typically accompany it, is an unresolved issue. It is widely accepted that no factual belief is sufficient for holding a particular stance, but some have argued that holding certain factual beliefs is nonetheless necessary for adopting a given stance. I argue against this claim, along (...) with the weaker claim that while there are no beliefs that are necessary for adopting a particular stance, those who share a stance must share some characteristic belief(s) in common. I outline and defend an alternative ‘cluster’ account, according to which, in order to accept a stance, one must hold some minimal subset of the set of theoretical beliefs characteristic of the stance in question. This view can accommodate the intuitions motivating those who defend the stronger necessity claims, while crucially allowing for the flexibility of a stance vis-à-vis the relevant factual beliefs, and its relative independence from those beliefs, which is central to van Fraassen’s main examples of stances and their nature. (shrink)

This article describes a method of scoping for potential ethical contentions within a resource constrained research environment where actor participation and bottom–up analysis is precluded. Instead of reverting to a top–down analytical structure, a data-led process is devised. This imitates a bottom–up analytic structure in the absence of the direct participation of actors, culminating in the construction of a map of the ethical landscape; a high-resolution ethical matrix of coded interpretations of various actors’ ethical framings of the technology. Despite its (...) limitations, which are discussed, the map can subsequently support the identification of areas where ethical contentions may be raised. Here, the method is described with reference to the construction and analysis of a map of the ethical landscape of carbon capture and storage technology. Taken as a preliminary stage of a larger study, it can support the design and initiation of more sophisticated analyses which may integrate stronger bottom–up participation and facilitate a reflective, deliberative process amongst actors. (shrink)

Many liberals and secularists believe that religious schooling should not be publicly funded or that it should simply be banned. Challenging those views, I claim that although liberal states may refuse to fund and may even ban certain illiberal separate religious schools, it is impermissible, for distinctively liberal reasons, to completely ban publicly funded religious schooling. I will however argue that providing religious instruction within common public schools is more desirable than having separate religious schools. I argue that providing religious (...) instruction within common public schools is a better way to balance the educational interests of parents, children and society than banning religious schooling altogether; authorizing it but refusing to fund it; or having publicly funded separate religious schools. (shrink)

Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2‐ to 6‐year‐old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations (i.e., the meaningful relationships between elements within a discourse) to constrain their interpretation of novel words. Specifically, we showed participants videos of novel animals exchanging objects. (...) These videos were accompanied by a linguistic description of the events in which we manipulated a single word within a sentence (and vs. because) in order to alter the causal and temporal relations between the events in the discourse (e.g., “One animal handed the baby to the other animal [and/because] the baby started crying in the talfa's arms”). We then asked participants which animal (the giver or the receiver) was the referent of the novel word. Across two experiments, we found evidence that young children used the causal and temporal relations in each discourse to constrain their interpretations of novel words. (shrink)