Politics is hugely complex. Some try to reduce its complexity by examining it through an ideological worldview, a one-size-fits-all prescriptive formula or a quantitative examination of as many 'facts' as possible. Yet politics cannot be adequately handled as if it were made of cells and particles: ideological views are oversimplifying and sometimes dangerous. Politics is not simply a moral matter, nor political philosophy a subdivision of moral philosophy. This book is devised as a basic conceptual lexicon for all those who (...) want to understand what politics is, how it works and how it changes or fails to change. Key concepts such as power, conflict, legitimacy and order are clearly defined and their interplay in the state, interstate and global level explored. Principles such as liberty, equality, justice and solidarity are discussed in the context of the political choices confronting us. This compact and systematic introduction to the categories needed to grasp the fundamentals of politics will appeal to readers who want to gain a firmer grasp on the workings of politics, as well as to scholars and students of philosophy, political science and history. (shrink)

This paper breaks with the sociological notion of ‘risk society’ and argues in favour of a philosophical view that sees the two planetary threats of late modernity, nuclear weapons and global warming, as ultimate challenges to morality and politics rather than risks that we can take and manage. The paper also raises the question of why we should feel responsible for the effects of these two global challenges on future generations and in this sense elaborates on the transgenerational chain of (...) parenthood rather than on considerations of justice. (shrink)

Argumentation Frameworks provide a fruitful basis for exploring issues of defeasible reasoning. Their power largely derives from the abstract nature of the arguments within the framework, where arguments are atomic nodes in an undifferentiated relation of attack. This abstraction conceals different senses of argument, namely a single-step reason to a claim, a series of reasoning steps to a single claim, and reasoning steps for and against a claim. Concrete instantiations encounter difficulties and complexities as a result of conflating these senses. (...) To distinguish them, we provide an approach to instantiating AFs in which the nodes are restricted to literals and rules, encoding the underlying theory directly. Arguments in these senses emerge from this framework as distinctive structures of nodes and paths. As a consequence of the approach, we reduce the effort of computing argumentation extensions, which is in contrast to other approaches. Our framework retains the theoretical and computational bene.. (shrink)

The peaceful and democratic integration of the European countries cannot be completed if the EU does not become a true, though not-federal, polity. Making the European institutions fully legitimate and accountable requires the development of political identity in a shape which is different from both national and cultural identity and is not merely opposite to diversity and change. Its contents can be seen in a specific set of constitutional values and principles, including a model of social relations, an international standing (...) and a peculiar and unprecedented system of governance. Identity-formation in the EU goes through several channels, but has still to generate a European public sphere, though the source of this difficulty does not lie in the lack of a European people or demos. (shrink)

In this paper we ask whether approximation for abstract argumentation is useful in practice, and in particular whether reasoning with grounded semantics – which has polynomial runtime – is already an approximation approach sufficient for several practical purposes. While it is clear from theoretical results that reasoning with grounded semantics is different from, for example, skeptical reasoning with preferred semantics, we investigate how significant this difference is in actual argumentation frameworks. As it turns out, in many graphs models, reasoning with (...) grounded semantics actually approximates reasoning with other semantics almost perfectly. An algorithm for grounded reasoning is thus a conceptually simple approximation algorithm that not only does not need a learning phase – like recent approaches – but also approximates well – in practice – several decision problems associated to other semantics. (shrink)

In this article the claim of normative ethics to be the main philosophical access to the problems raised by climate change is contested and instead it is suggested that these problems be addressed from a different perspective: that of a political philosophy that escapes its own reduction to a theory of justice. Part I shows several incidences of how mainstream climate ethics fails with regard to its intention to shape an effective climate policy. Part II argues that ‘politics for the (...) future’ as required by man-made lethal challenges has to complement the adversarial politics-as-usual. Included here is a redefinition of what the relationship of politics and morality means in the new circumstances – not only with regard to climate change. (shrink)

Volume 6, Issue 3, September 2015, Page 292-309.

Volume 6, Issue 3, September 2015, Page 292-309.