bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Relevance Theory and Kinesic Analysis in Don Quixote and Madame Bovary
Authors: Bolens Guillemette
Published: June 2018

Relevance in acts of communication is a focus in both Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and it operates on two levels. One level corresponds to interactions between characters in the plot, the other to readers’ reception of the overarching utterance constituting the literary work. The chapter addresses both levels while linking relevance theory to kinesic analysis, in order to account for some of the cognitive processes activated in literary reception when we understand complex kinesic information (movements, postures, gaits, gestural interactions). While relevance theory helps account for communicational inference procedures within the plot as well as in the work’s literary reception, kinesic analysis addresses the specific type of inference elicited in readers by linguistic utterances referring to gestural and sensorimotor elements in narrative.
Feckless Reason
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

Empirical research on aesthetic response poses two challenges to philosophy. The more familiar challenge is that scientific explanations of aesthetic responses debunk what we take to be our reasons for those responses. One reaction to this challenge is an accommodation strategy that seeks to reconcile the scientific findings with an improved understanding of our normative reasons. This paper presents a more fundamental challenge: a well-established body of research in social psychology indicates that we routinely confabulate the reasons we give for our aesthetic response. This challenges the accommodation strategy and suggests that philosophy should adopt a more radical naturalism about aesthetic response.
Vision, Touch, and the Value of Pictures
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

Since those born blind can draw and interpret raised-line drawings, depiction is not an essentially visual medium. Conceding this, Robert Hopkins denies that raised-line drawings can be works of pictorial art: tactile experiences of raised-line drawings are not aesthetic experiences. This paper addresses Hopkins’s concerns. The reasons given for evaluating a picture aesthetically can cite its tactile qualities instead of its visual qualities. In particular, a raised-line picture can be valued for how it evokes a tactile experience of a worldly scene, just as a visual picture can be valued for how it evokes a visual experience of its subject.
Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

Everybody assumes (1) that musical performances are sonic events and (2) that their expressive properties are sonic properties. This paper discusses recent findings in the psychology of music perception that show that visual information combines with auditory information in the perception of musical expression. The findings show at the very least that arguments are needed for (1) and (2). If music expresses what we think it does, then its expressive properties may be visual as well as sonic; and if its expressive properties are purely sonic, then music expresses less than we think it does. And if the expressive properties of music are visual as well as sonic, then music is not what we think it is—it is not purely sonic.
Drawing in a Social Science
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

Scientific images represent types or particulars. According to a standard history of scientific images, with its accompanying epistemology, drawings are fit to represent types whereas machine-made images are fit to represent particulars. However, it is standard practice for archaeologists to use drawings of some particulars, notably stone tools, even though these particulars are easy to photograph. To explain this archaeological practice, this chapter presents an alternative to the standard history and the standard epistemology. Lithic drawings highlight the usefulness, in some contexts, of images that merge information presented non-conceptually and free of interpretation with information presented through conceptualized interpretation.
An Empathic Eye
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

What you see can shape how you feel, and the route from seeing to feeling sometimes involves empathy—as one might empathize with a woman seen grieving the death of her child. But empathy also comes from what is seen in pictures. Many paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs are designed to evoke empathy. Moreover, episodes of empathy triggered by pictures can help build up a person’s capacity for empathic response. Indeed, they do so by fortifying the link between seeing and empathy in a distinctive way. The case for this thesis relies upon a broad conception of empathic response plus the right conception of what it is to see scenes in pictures.
Documents, Documentation, and the Making of History Books
Authors: Cleaver Laura
Published: June 2018

History books functioned to preserve historical records, and some scribes and artists attempted to replicate the features of documents when they compiled copies of them in cartularies. This chapter asks how and why the makers of manuscripts attempted to evoke the features of documents, particularly when cartularies could not serve the same evidential function. Beginning with an examination of a remarkable version of the Domesday Book created in the mid-thirteenth century, it explores how text and imagery were combined in cartularies and associated records. Although cartularies, like the Domesday Book, gave an impression of authority, they were carefully crafted, and did not always contain copies of a complete archive. Instead, the organization of the text and addition of illumination in some cartularies suggest that they were designed for specific audiences, including monastic communities and potential patrons.
Naming an Unnamable God
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

One of the most crucial sources for divulging knowledge about the nature of God and his relationship with his creation are the various names by which God is identified throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic corpus. This chapter examines those names, especially the Tetragrammaton, based on God’s revelation to Moses recorded in Exodus of the name “I will be who I will be.” Close readings of the biblical narratives as interpreted by all the Jewish intellectual traditions, including rabbinic/midrashic, rationalist/philosophical, and kabbalistic/mystical, reveal a God of “becoming” rather than the philosophical God of “being.” The encounter and dialogue, between Moses and God, out of which the name emerges is the moment that transformatively envisages all future divine–human encounters.
Using God’s Name for the Mundane
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter follows naturally out of the previous one in its presentation of a case of theology crystallizing into Jewish law. It examines various instances of concrete law that involve the divine name and its use in everyday life. The rabbinic allows for the exploitation of the most sacred for the most mundane, drawing the divine into the horizontal plane of human relationships. The first instance discussed is where classical rabbis allowed the name YHVH to form an integral part of the common salutation. The second examined is allowing the name’s effacement in order to repair a spousal breakdown. God disappears so that love can reappear. The third instance involves a battle to eradicate evil in the world. God’s name remains incomplete as long as that evil exists.
The Limitations of the Open Mind
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn’t engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn’t engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as some of the informal logic literature on argumentation. Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what’s wrong with it. Still, even if you can’t figure out what’s wrong with an argument, you can know that it’s misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn’t engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn’t engage with it at all. You shouldn’t engage open-mindedly because you shouldn’t be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn’t engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. In making this case, the book discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers.
A Defense of (a Different Kind of) Dogmatism
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues for a kind of dogmatism (though not the sort famously defended by Jim Pryor): that you can retain knowledge even if you spend significant time with an argument, find each step compelling, and are unable to expose a flaw. It is uncontroversial that knowledge can survive some such counterarguments: trick arguments that 1=0, paradoxical arguments that nothing moves, perceptual arguments that a rabbit has spontaneously appeared in a previously empty hat. But, debates in the literature on disagreement aside, knowledge can survive such counterarguments even when they concern controversial matters of ethics, politics, religion, science, and philosophy. You often have what would otherwise count as knowledge-level positive support for your controversial beliefs. This support is often not defeated by what turns out to be the rather weak evidence provided by the fact that a counterargument is apparently flawless.
The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism
Authors: Renker Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.
Late-Century African American Poets and Realist Gentility
Authors: Renker Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that late-century black poets carved out a new postbellum form of African American poetic realism. These poets, too, have fallen prey to the twilight narrative. While critics often fault their work as “conventional,” this chapter contests the scholarly argument that the “conventionality” of black genteel verse is a problem to be lamented, showing it instead to have been an arena for innovation. Priscilla Jane Thompson, George Marion McClellan, William H. A. [W. H. A.] Moore, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray all carved out unique forms of African American poetic expression in which “gentility” became a performance space that opened up a realist counterpoetics of their own. As they performed the genteel, these poets engaged and claimed its tropes, undermining and countering its fantasies and rewriting them as black-voiced reality checks on the genteel poetic mode.
Melville Renders the Real
Authors: Renker Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

During the eighties and through his death in 1891—that is, the height of high realism and the Realism War—Melville actively wrote, revised, and published his last two volumes, composed Billy Budd, and wrote and revised an extensive body of unpublished poems. Yet scholarship has rarely situated Melville the poet in the debates about realism and idealism common in the print culture of the age. This chapter demonstrates that he carved out a realist poetics. This poetics simultaneously countered both Howellsian models of realism and the genteel poetics of romantic idealism. Melville predicates his realist poetic practice on a vision of “the Real”—his term in “The Aeolian Harp” (1888)—as epistemologically opaque.
Faith Worth Having
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

This chapter articulates and defends a strategy focused on faith worth having, in contrast to alternative strategies that focus on meanings or truth conditions of key terms. One might think of such an approach as one that mixes metaphysics and value theory, thinking of the idea of fundamentality here in terms of axiological fundamentality. This approach puts axiology first, leaving open the possibility that a substantial portion of the logical space of the language of faith and the conceptualizations involved can be written off as uninteresting or unimportant.
Functional Faith in Religious Contexts
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

The primary focus to this point has been to reveal the extent to which faith worth having is not a distinctively sacred topic. Such a focus can make it seem that this kind of faith is one that doesn’t fit well in sacred arenas, where the standard assumptions about faith require substantive doctrinal commitments. I intend to argue that this perception is mistaken, and that the language of faith in SacredWrit is driven largely if not completely by this same kind of faith.
Conclusion
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

This chapter summarizes the results obtained. Faith is both a secular and a sacred virtue, displaying the same nature in both contexts. This nature is fundamentally dispositional rather than doxastic or cognitive, and the states that realize the disposition are behavioural, cognitive, affective, and conative. Though a virtue, faith has a downside, and the same is true of humility. The distinctive relationship between the two is that each is a virtue complementary to the other.
Introduction
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 1 introduces the semantic and metaphysical problem raised by the expanding uses of psychological predicates throughout biology. Sellars’ widely-known framework of the Manifest and Scientific Images provides a stepping stone for initial grasp of the current anthropocentrism in interpreting psychological predicates and the capacities to which they refer. The chapter introduces Literalism, which holds that the predicates are used literally with the same reference across human and nonhuman biological domains. This view is the natural conclusion of a plausible interpretation of scientific practices and discernible trends in those practices. The chapter also provides an outline of the book, a summary of subsequent chapters, and a brief discussion of consciousness, panpsychism, and content.
Cases
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 3 introduces the use of mathematical models and modeling practices in contemporary biological and cognitive sciences. The familiar Lotka–Volterra model of predator–prey relations is used to explain these practices and show how they promote the extensions of predicates, including psychological predicates, into new and often unexpected domains. It presents two models of cognitive capacities that were developed to explain human behavioral data: Ratcliff’s drift-diffusion model of decision-making and Sutton and Barto’s temporal difference model of reinforcement learning. These are now used for fruit flies and neural populations. It also discusses contemporary and ongoing attempts to revise psychological concepts in response to empirical discovery.
Literalism and Moral Status
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 9 presents the idea that Literalism undermines current social and moral boundaries for moral status. Possession of psychological capacities, moral standing, and respectful treatment are a standard package deal. So either many more beings enjoy moral status than we now think, or the relative superiority of human moral status over other beings is diminished. It introduces the role of psychological ascriptions in drawing social and moral boundaries by examining dehumanization and anthropomorphism. It argues that in the short term Literalism does not motivate us to do more than make minor adjustments to current moral boundaries. We can distinguish the kinds of psychological capacities that matter for moral status from the kinds that best divide nature at its joints. In the long run, however, Literalism prompts us to reconsider the anthropocentric standards that govern current moral boundaries.
Concluding Summary
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 10 provides a summary of the argument of the book. It elaborates some of the benefits of Literalism, such as less conceptual confusion and an expanded range of entities for research that might illuminate human cognition. It motivates distinguishing the questions of whether something has a cognitive capacity from whether it is intuitively like us. It provides a conceptual foundation for the social sciences appropriate for the increasing role of modeling in these sciences. It also promotes convergence in terms of the roles of internal and external factors in explaining both human and nonhuman behavior. Finally, it sketches some of the areas of new research that it supports, including group cognition and artificial intelligence.
Dual Intentional Agency
Authors: Schechter Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter defends the 2-agents claim, according to which the two hemispheres of a split-brain subject are associated with distinct intentional agents. The empirical basis of this claim is that, while both hemispheres are the source or site of intentions, the capacity to integrate them in practical reasoning no longer operates interhemispherically after split-brain surgery. As a result, the right hemisphere-associated agent, R, and the left hemisphere-associated agent, L, enjoy intentional autonomy from each other. Although the positive case for the 2-agents claim is grounded mainly in experimental findings, the claim is not contradicted by what we know of split-brain subjects’ ordinary behavior, that is, the way they act outside of experimental conditions.
The Self-Consciousness Condition of Personhood
Authors: Schechter Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that the capacity for first-personal self-distinction is a condition of personhood. R and L lack the capacity to first-personally distinguish themselves from each other. On the other hand, they possess the capacity to first-personally distinguish S from everything else. This means that it is not R and L as R and L, but rather the two together, as S, that meets this condition of personhood. Because the capacity for self-distinction is so basic, this in turn affects how R and L exercise many of their other personal capacities. Indeed, they cannot relate to themselves or to other people as distinct persons, but only as (parts of) one person, S. This both evokes and supports the unity intuition, according to which S is indeed one of us.
Introduction
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: June 2018

Chapter 1 paves the way for the discussion of the nature and moral salience of individual virtuous emotions in subsequent chapters by (a) explaining and defending an Aristotelian componential view of what an emotion is; (b) addressing the distinction between ‘virtuous emotions’ and ‘emotion(al) virtues’; and (c) explaining the salience, in an Aristotelian system, of emotion education. The author explains the debates that rage on these issues and takes a stand on them. Most importantly, Aristotelian emotions have a cognitive core. It is this cognitive core that underlies the assumption of responsibility for emotions, for we can typically be held accountable for, and evaluated morally with respect to, the content of our cognitions—unless those are the results of indoctrination or brainwashing. In general, this chapter paves the way for the discussion of the moral epistemology of virtuous emotions in Chapter 2, and the analysis of specific emotions to follow, by setting the discussion in the context of a general Aristotelian position on what emotions are correctly understood to be, psychologically and conceptually.
Shame
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: June 2018

Rather than focusing exclusively on Aristotle’s own account of shame and its possible shortcomings, this chapter offers a philosophical meditation on contrasting interpretations of the emotion of shame within four academic discourses: social psychology, psychological anthropology, educational psychology, and Aristotelian scholarship. It turns out that within each of these discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasizes shame’s expendability or moral ugliness, but also a heterodox interpretation which seeks to retrieve and defend shame. The provenance of the mainstream interpretation merits scrutiny as the heterodox interpretation seems to offer a more realistic picture of shame’s role in moral development. The chapter suggests ways forward for more balanced analyses of the nature, moral justification, and educative role of shame, by reconstructing Aristotle’s own account of shame.
Jealousy
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: June 2018

Chapter 6 proceeds via a critical review of recent writings about jealousy in philosophy and psychology. Although Aristotle himself did not explore this emotion, it is easily amenable to an Aristotle-style analysis. It turns out, however, that although Aristotelian conceptual and moral arguments about the necessary conceptual features of jealousy qua specific emotion, and the intrinsic value or disvalue of a stable trait of jealousy for eudaimonia, do carry philosophical mileage, they may fail to cut ice with psychologists who tend to focus on jealousy as a broad dimension of temperament. The chapter reveals a disconcerting lack of cross-disciplinary work on jealousy: the sort of work that has moved the discourse on various other emotions forward in recent years. It explains how the best way to ameliorate this lacuna is, precisely, through an Aristotelian analysis, where jealousy is (perhaps counter-intuitively) accorded a place as a potentially virtuous emotion.
Conclusions and Afterthoughts
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: June 2018

Chapter 10 draws together the main strands of argument from previous chapters and offers some concluding remarks on the virtuousness and education of emotion, on Aristotelian naturalism, and on the complexities of transdisciplinary work on emotions. It also provides a table which summarizes the main components of each specific virtue, identified in preceding chapters, as seen from an Aristotelian perspective. The chapter closes by offering the following advice to practically minded emotion theorists: Do read Aristotle first. It helps. But, equally, do not hesitate to depart from him where needed—and do not skip reading the contemporary psychological literature. It helps also.
Compassionate Moral Realism
Authors: Marshall Colin
Published: June 2018

This book offers a novel defense of compassion and morality. The core claim is that compassion is our capacity to perceive or experience other creatures’ pains, pleasures, and desires as they really are, and that mere factual knowledge is no replacement for this. As a result, people without compassion cannot fully face reality, even if they know what reality contains. Part I of the book defends this claim with respect to simple cases involving compassion for a suffering creature. Part II extends that conclusion to cases involving other states and multiple creatures, thereby providing a general epistemic answer to the “why be moral?” question. Part III uses the argument of Part I to develop a novel form of moral realism. This view, called “Compassionate Moral Realism,” offers a distinctive set of virtues. It is naturalist, and yet posits necessary, knowable moral facts. It also vindicates the intuition that there is an epistemic asymmetry between morally good people and amoral people. Unlike other views, it locates that asymmetry at the level of perception or experience, not at the level of propositional judgment or knowledge. Throughout, the argument draws on a variety of historical figures and on work in contemporary metaethics.
Introduction
Authors: Marshall Colin
Published: June 2018

In this introduction, the argument of the book is outlined and some important clarifications are presented. The present project of grounding morality is distinguished from much recent work in metaethics. The argumentative framework of non-eliminative naturalism is also presented. In addition, several issues are identified which are set side for the purposes of this argument: psychological questions about what empathy and compassion “really” are and about how compassion develops in humans, linguistic questions about what the term “compassion” refers to in normal English, and philosophical questions about the ultimate content of compassionate states and about the choice between different moral paradigms.
“Why Be Moral?” and Epistemic Goods
Authors: Marshall Colin
Published: June 2018

This chapter illustrates the possibility of an epistemic answer to the “why be moral?” question, drawing on the views of Plato, William Wollaston, and Arthur Schopenhauer. The broad notion of an epistemic good is introduced and clarified, along with a special property of some goods: irreplaceability. Along the way, the idea of epistemic goods other than test-passing propositional knowledge is introduced. As a result, it is claimed that an epistemic answer to the “why be moral?” question would identify some epistemic good that only paradigmatically morally good people have, and for which paradigmatically amoral people have no replacement or comparable compensation. Finally, one relevant paradigm of moral goodness is introduced: that of a compassionate agent.
Combination and Comparison
Authors: Marshall Colin
Published: June 2018

After considering the possibility of a deontological application of the notion of being in touch, this chapter argues that compassionate agents achieve intuitively correct moral comparisons by being in touch with certain complex objects. A spatiotemporal analogy is first considered, in which agents can be in touch with large-scale and historical properties of physical objects by proportionately zooming out in their mind’s eye. This framework is then applied to compassionate engagement with pains of different intensities, duration, and quantities, with the result that differences in being in touch coincide with intuitive differences in moral goodness. In a similar vein, a J. S. Mill-inspired heuristic is introduced, in which we imagine an unbiased agent reaching a preference through living through all the potential courses of experience that her actions could lead to and deciding which courses to live through again. Related issues concerning probability and spatiotemporal proximity are also discussed.
The Truth that Pain is Bad
Authors: Marshall Colin
Published: June 2018

This chapter articulates several core claims of Compassionate Moral Realism, and argues that the view thereby satisfies the semantic and metaphysical criteria for moral realism. The chapter focuses on the claim that pain is objectively bad, arguing that it is literally true and corresponds to a stance-independent moral fact. After clarifying the meaning of that claim, a partial analysis for “objectively bad” is defended, according to which something is objectively bad if any subject in touch with it would be averse to it. After showing how this partial analysis connects to other philosophers’ analyses of value-related notions and follows from several defensible full analyses, a potential objection based on Moore’s Open Question Argument is considered and answered. It is then shown that “pain is objectively bad” is therefore literally true on this analysis, and that the corresponding fact is stance-independent in the relevant ways.
The Limits of Emotion
Authors: May Joshua
Published: June 2018

Empirical research apparently suggests that emotions play an integral role in moral judgment. The evidence for sentimentalism is diverse, but it is rather weak and has generally been overblown. There is no evidence that our moral concepts themselves are partly composed of or necessarily dependent on emotions. While the moral/conventional distinction may partly characterize the essence of moral judgment, moral norms needn’t be backed by affect in order to transcend convention. Priming people with incidental emotions like disgust doesn’t make them moralize actions. Finally, moral judgment can only be somewhat impaired by damage to areas of the brain that are generally associated with emotional processing (as in acquired sociopathy and frontotemporal dementia). While psychopaths exhibit both emotional and rational deficits, the latter alone can explain any minor defects in moral cognition.
Reasoning beyond Consequences
Authors: May Joshua
Published: June 2018

Experimental research demonstrates that moral judgment involves both conscious and unconscious reasoning or inference that is not mere post-hoc rationalization. The evidence suggests in particular that we treat as morally significant more than the consequences of a person’s actions, including characteristically deontological distinctions between: intentional vs. accidental outcomes, actions vs. omissions, and harming as a means vs. a byproduct (familiar from the Doctrine of Double Effect). And the relevant empirical evidence relies on more than responses to unrealistic moral dilemmas characteristic of the trolley problem. The result is an extremely minimal dual process model of moral judgment on which we at least compute both an action’s outcomes and the actor’s role in bringing them about. This view resembles the famous linguistic analogy (or moral grammar hypothesis) in only its least controversial aspects, particularly the emphasis on unconscious reasoning in moral cognition.
Cautious Optimism
Authors: May Joshua
Published: June 2018

This chapter briefly draws out some main lessons from the previous chapters and contains a discussion of some their implications for moral enhancement. We are capable of moral knowledge and virtue, in part because we do have a regard for reason that ultimately complicates the reason/emotion dichotomy. We do often fall short, but when we do, the problem is not with moral psychology in particular but the ways in which reason can be corrupted generally. One broad implication of cautious optimism is that the best method for increasing virtue won’t target our empathy or passions to the exclusion of our (often unconscious) reasoning. However, sound arguments aren’t enough, for human beings are fallible creatures with cognitive biases and limited attention spans. An intelligent populace is necessary, but so is moral technology, such as environments that nudge people to engage in good reasoning, not rationalization, particularly during moral learning and development.
Morality, Reality, and Humanitarian Intervention
Authors: Coady C. A. J.
Published: June 2018

There are two profound points of departure for discussions of the moral evaluation of humanitarian intervention and its partial echo in international law, the Responsibility to Protect. The first is the distressingly massive damage sometimes inflicted on people by their own governments (or other politically powerful and unhindered agents), and the second concerns the appalling disasters and ravages of war. The first cries out to outsiders for action to prevent or discontinue the horror (which may itself involve forms of warfare, such as civil war), but the second cautions against those forms of intervention or protection that themselves threaten to replace the horror with something as or even more damaging. The tension between these two instincts has been a significant issue in many violent conflicts in very different parts of the world in the last part of the twentieth century and into the present day, and, of course, has earlier historical precedents....
Women and Humanitarian Intervention
Authors: Thompson Janna
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the prospects for the R2P framework in combating women’s oppression, with specific attention to Bosnia in the 1990s and in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. It argues that while mass rape in Bosnia did constitute ‘just cause’ for humanitarian intervention, other desiderata, like proportionality and likelihood of success, present greater difficulty. The chapter notes two assumptions commonly present in the humanitarian intervention debate. One, humanitarian intervention is supposed to target repressive states or murderous militias, not the cultural traditions of the population. Two, the repressing regime is ethnically, racially, religiously, or ideologically distinct from the repressed. It is argued that these assumptions did not hold in Afghanistan, since the Taliban’s repressive laws regarding women had some prior cultural basis in parts of the society. The chapter is more optimistic about a focus on women’s oppression in aspects of R2P other than military intervention: namely in prevention and rebuilding.
On the Uses and ‘Abuses’ of Responsibility to Protect
Authors: Dobos Ned
Published: June 2018

Critics of the R2P doctrine routinely warn of its abuse potential, but often leave underdescribed what this abuse consists of, and how it differs from the proper, legitimate use of R2P. This chapter seeks to remedy this descriptive neglect. The author distinguishes three kinds of foreign intervention that might, for different reasons, be considered abuses or misappropriations of the R2P norm. The first is where the language of R2P is used to publicly justify an intervention that in fact has little to do with protecting vulnerable populations. These are cases in which humanitarian rhetoric is used as window-dressing for economic or political self-aggrandizement. The second kind of R2P abuse involves its unilateral implementation. Third, the R2P norm is arguably abused when it is over-extended, as where it is invoked to justify the forcible democratization of undemocratic states, rather than being limited to the prevention of grave human rights violations.
Maximus
Authors: Byers Mark
Published: June 2018

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.
Two Realms of Rights
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: June 2018

Theorists generally see rights as inhabiting one or both of two realms: the legal or more broadly institutional and the moral realm. This chapter offers broad working accounts of these realms, comparing and contrasting their denizens. Both law and morality involve systems of rules, including deontic rules. Deontic legal or institutional rules as such are abstract objects from which nothing follows about what anyone ought to do. In short, as such, these rules are not normative. In contrast, deontic moral rules are normative. Consideration of the normativity of personal decisions suggests that there is room for a realm of rights that is neither institutional nor moral.
Hohfeld’s Claims and Thomson’s Doubts
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: June 2018

This chapter focuses on Hohfeldian claims. One person’s claim against another is correlative and equivalent to that other’s duty toward him. The relevant notion of “equivalence” is explained, and the relational nature of claims against and duties toward others—directed duties—is emphasized. Evidently one way better to understand claims is through an understanding of directed duties. Rights theorists generally assume without argument that the latter are constituted at least in part by non-directed or plain duties. This standard assumption can be questioned. In this connection, Judith Thomson’s argument to the effect that nothing useful can be made of the notion of a directed duty as opposed to a plain duty is reviewed and argued to be inconclusive.
Agreements and Promises
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: June 2018

This chapter begins an inquiry into the source of the demand-rights generally understood to be associated with agreements and promises. Following the literature it focuses on promises, discussing several points it takes to be firm, including the need for acceptance by the promisee and the inevitability and directedness of promissory obligation—the primary obligation of a promisor. It then reviews David Hume’s influential discussion of promises and relates it to the central contemporary approaches. Understanding promissory obligation to be a matter of moral requirement, Hume argues against the idea that it is a creature of the will, as is commonly thought, and proposes an alternative, conventionalist account of such obligation. Most contemporary theorists accept the former point; some are conventionalists and others not.
The Ubiquity of Joint Commitment
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: June 2018

After noting that joint commitments can be made gradually and by more subtle means than those constitutive of agreements and promises, and that they may obtain in large populations spread over great distances, this chapter argues that many central social phenomena other than agreements and promises are constituted by joint commitments with associated demand-rights and directed obligations. These phenomena range from the instantaneous occurrence of “mutual recognition” between two people in close proximity to large, enduring social groups. They include shared intentions or plans, doing things together, and collective attitudes such as collective value judgments. It is argued also that a particular kind of joint commitment offers an intelligible ground for command authority. Thus, should joint commitment be the only source of demand-rights, such rights will still be ubiquitous in human lives.
Are There Any Moral Demand-Rights? Part I
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: June 2018

A moral demand-right as understood here is a demand-right discovered by moral argument without any appeal to a joint commitment as the immediate basis of the right. This chapter focuses on individualized moral demand-rights, such as a moral demand-right of each person to each person’s refraining from assaulting him, and concludes that their existence is doubtful. Among other things it critically reviews several arguments to the contrary, including H. L. A. Hart’s famous attempt to prove that there is at least one “natural” right, in a new interpretation, and some arguments suggested by Stephen Darwall. It then argues that given only a case of mutual recognition as characterized in chapter ten, the parties accrue demand-rights of joint commitment with the same content as central supposed moral demand-rights, such as a right not to be assaulted. The same goes with relevant changes for joint commitments in general.
Conclusion
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: June 2018

Given the practical significance of demand-rights, it is important to understand how they are possible. This is the general demand-right problem. Solving it turns out to be a challenging task, one that takes us beyond the resources of the central contemporary theories of rights.

This book has provided a solution to the general demand-right problem: joint commitment is a ground of demand-rights....
Interlude
Authors: Bailkin Jordanna
Published: June 2018

The Interlude narrates the diverse and often harrowing stories of how refugees arrived in Britain during the twentieth century. But it also questions the fetish of arrival that characterizes many refugee stories. Scenes of arrival (the trains of the Kindertransporte, the small boats from Vietnam rescued by British ships)—iconic though they have become—cut the story of refugees short. They uphold the fiction that each situation was the result of an unprecedented, temporary crisis that was foreign and external to Britain: in short, an emergency. This chapter offers comparative history as a rejoinder to the corrosive discourse of emergency. It argues for seeing refugee camps not as signs of emergency—disconnected from Britain’s own history—but as deeply rooted in that history.
Mixing Up
Authors: Bailkin Jordanna
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores the relationships between refugee camps and the localities around them. Camps varied widely in their openness to the surrounding community, and how positively or negatively this openness was perceived. This chapter traces the interactions between refugees and local Britons. Many displaced or homeless Britons lived in refugee camps, not only giving aid, but also receiving it. Refugees and citizens interacted in camps not only as tragic victims and heroic saviors. Rather, they were twinned populations in need. This chapter also considers how communities of color reacted to refugees, and how migrants and refugees crafted complicated ties of mutual responsibility.
Hard Core
Authors: Bailkin Jordanna
Published: June 2018

This chapter addresses how camps functioned as sites of rebellion and daily acts of resistance. As camps transitioned from military to civilian control, they developed conflicting regimes of discipline with competing definitions of physical and political freedom. Camp authorities and refugees struggled to determine whether refugees could enter and leave the camps freely, and if they could choose where and when to settle. The chapter considers how camp authorities sought to limit refugees’ freedoms and what rationales they offered—within a liberal democratic society—for these restrictions. In Britain, refugee camps dramatized the tensions around mobility (physical, social, and political) that characterize democratic states and selves.
Representing Physical Phenomena
Authors: Bueno Otávio , French Steven
Published: June 2018

This chapter extends the case study on quantum mechanics to include not only the ‘top-down’ application of group theory to quantum physics but also the ‘bottom-up’ construction of models of the phenomena, with the example of London’s explanation of the superfluid behaviour of liquid helium in terms of Bose–Einstein statistics. We claim that in moving from top to bottom, from the mathematics to what is observed in the laboratory, the models involved and the relations between them can again be accommodated by the partial structures approach, coupled with an appreciation of the heuristic moves involved in scientific work. Furthermore, as in the previous examples, this case fits with our inferential account of the application of mathematics, whereby immersion of the phenomena into the relevant mathematics allows for the drawing down of structure and the derivation of certain results that can then be interpreted at the phenomenological level.
Applying Problematic Mathematics, Interpreting Successful Structures
Authors: Bueno Otávio , French Steven
Published: June 2018

In this chapter we consider whether, in applying mathematics in the ways described in previous chapters, there are grounds for taking the relevant mathematical entities to be indispensable. Our example here is Dirac’s introduction of the delta function into quantum mechanics and we point out, firstly, that Dirac himself was very clear about the function’s dispensability and, secondly, even if certain mathematical theories were indispensable, this wouldn’t justify a commitment to the existence of the associated entities. To illustrate this second point we use a further example, that of Dirac’s prediction of the existence of antimatter via the exploitation of surplus mathematical structure. We maintain here that commitment to the existence of the objects under consideration requires the satisfaction of certain criteria of existence and it is unclear whether mathematical entities meet these criteria.
Explaining with Mathematics? From Cicadas to Symmetry
Authors: Bueno Otávio , French Steven
Published: June 2018

The putative explanatory role of mathematics is further pursued in this chapter in the context of the so-called indispensability argument. Our conclusion here is that the possibility of mathematical entities acquiring some explanatory role is not well motivated, even within the framework of an account of explanation that might be sympathetic to such a role. We also consider the claim that certain scientific features have a hybrid mathematico-physical nature, again in the context of a specific example, namely that of spin, but we argue that the assertion of hybridity also lacks strong motivation and comes with associated metaphysical costs. Furthermore, such claims fail to fully grasp the details of the interrelationships between mathematical and physical structures in general and the distinction between the mathematical formalism and its interpretation in particular.
Conclusion
Authors: Bueno Otávio , French Steven
Published: June 2018

This final chapter considers two sets of criticisms of our overall approach. The first is that there may be cases where the special circumstances constructed via idealizations simply do not arise and thus such cases lie beyond the reach of our approach. We examine one such possible case, the discovery of the Omega-Minus particle, and conclude that it presents no particular obstacle to our account. The second concerns the role of the partial structures framework in capturing scientific practice, and here we emphasize that we see it as a meta-level representational device that, we argue, suits the purposes of philosophers of science when considering this practice.
Conclusion
Authors: Thorsteinsson Runar M.
Published: June 2018

While there are some passages in the Gospel of Mark that seem to counter the image of the philosopher—namely, the passages that describe Jesus’ emotions—the character of Jesus is often portrayed in terms that are analogous to Graeco-Roman descriptions of the ideal philosophical sage, especially Stoic ones. Similarly, Matthew’s Jesus is frequently characterized in a manner resembling the image of the philosophical sage. More so than in the Gospel of Mark, this applies even to Matthew’s description of Jesus’ emotions, some aspects of which do not correspond to typical images of the philosophical wise man. Also, in Luke the character of Jesus is consistently portrayed in a way that resembles Graeco-Roman descriptions of the ideal philosophical sage. This includes the description of Jesus’ feelings. Of the three Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus is most clearly characterized as a philosophical sage in the Gospel of Luke.