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Funder: Universität Hamburg (1037), We investigate the possibility of arguing for or against the philosophical position that mathematics is an epistemic exception on the basis of agreement data from the mathematical peer review process and argue that Cohen’s $$\kappa $$ κ , the standard agreement measure used for inter-rater agreement, is unable to detect epistemic exceptionality from peer review data.

The notion of comparative probability defined in Bayesian subjectivist theory stems from an intuitive idea that, for a given pair of events, one event may be considered “more probable” than the other. Yet it is conceivable that there are cases where it is indeterminate as to which event is more probable, due to, e.g., lack of robust statistical information. We take that these cases involve indeterminate comparative probabilities. This paper provides a Savage-style decision-theoretic foundation for indeterminate comparative probabilities.

Bernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed by Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being “principally about how things are in moral philosophy”? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This was Williams's solution to what he perceived as the stylistic problem of how to pursue philosophy as cultural critique. Taking the epigraphs as interpretative keys to the wider resonances of the book, we show how they reveal Williams's philosophical concerns—with the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life in a disillusioned world—to be recognisably rooted in the cultural concerns of post‐war Britain. In the light of its epigraphs, the book emerges as the critique of a philosophical tradition's inadequacies to the special difficulties of its cultural moment.

This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only proper refusals (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications.

While the story of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio engaging in a friendly contest, at the behest of Pope Urban IV, to compose the Mass and Office of Corpus Christi is likely a pious fiction, one can still ponder the fascinating hypothetical scenario: had such a contest taken place, who might have won? To consider that question, this paper embarks on a close reading of Bonaventure s hymns in his Office of the Passion, comparing his poetic approaches to those of Aquinas in the hymns for Corpus Christi. After an introductory historical examination into the supposed involvement of both friars in the composition of the Corpus Christi liturgy, this article proceeds in three sections. First, a look into select excerpts from Bonaventure s Office of the Passion will establish his general poetic technique. In the transitional second section, a direct comparison between Bonaventure and Aquinas on the composition of the final doxological verses of their respective hymns will place their different poetic styles into greater relief. Third, a broader reading of Aquinas s Eucharistic hymns will highlight the unique qualities of his versified praises. Finally, in light of the foregoing analyses, a prospective winner of the hypothetical contest will be suggested.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Arif Ahmed, David Chalmers, Marta Halina, Richard Holton, participants at Oslo Mind Group, and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks to Aker Scholarship for financial support., Funder: Aker Scholarship, It is common to characterise phenomenal consciousness as what it is like to be in a mental state. This paper argues that the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in this context has a technical meaning, i.e. a meaning for which the association to the relevant expression is peculiar to a theoretical community. The relevant theoretical community is philosophy and some parts of cognitive science, so on this view, only philosophers and cognitive scientists use the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in the way that is characteristic in the literature on phenomenal consciousness. This claim has important consequences. Firstly, I argue that the phrase says nothing informative about phenomenal consciousness. Secondly, I argue that the fact that non-philosophers use the phrase is not compelling evidence that they believe in phenomenal consciousness. These claims have further consequences for debates about phenomenal consciousness.

A common strategy in comparative cognition is to require that one reject associative learning as an explanation for behavior before concluding that an organism is capable of causal reasoning. In this paper, I argue that standard causal-reasoning tasks can be explained by a powerful form of associative learning: unlimited associative learning (UAL). The lesson, however, is not that researchers should conduct more studies to reject UAL, but that they should instead focus on 1) enriching the cognitive hypothesis space and 2) testing a broader range of information processing patterns—errors, biases and limits, rather than successful problem solving alone.

If categorical equivalence is a good criterion of theoretical equivalence, then it would seem that if some class of mathematical structures is represented as a category, then any other class of structures categorically equivalent to it will have the same representational capacities. Hudetz (2019a) has presented an apparent counterexample to this claim; in this note, I argue that the counterexample fails.

We develop a constructive theory of finite multisets in Homotopy Type Theory, defining them as free commutative monoids. After recalling basic structural properties of the free commutative-monoid construction, we formalise and establish the categorical universal property of two, necessarily equivalent, algebraic presentations of free commutative monoids using 1-HITs. These presentations correspond to two different equational theories invariably including commutation axioms. In this setting, we prove important structural combinatorial properties of finite multisets. These properties are established in full generality without assuming decidable equality on the carrier set. As an application, we present a constructive formalisation of the relational model of classical linear logic and its differential structure. This leads to constructively establishing that free commutative monoids are conical refinement monoids. Thereon we obtain a characterisation of the equality type of finite multisets and a new presentation of the free commutative-monoid construction as a set-quotient of the list construction. These developments crucially rely on the commutation relation of creation/annihilation operators associated with the free commutative-monoid construction seen as a combinatorial Fock space., Comment: Appeared in MFPS'22

Habits figure in action‐explanations because of their distinctive force. But what is the force of habit, and how does it motivate us? In this paper, I argue that the force of habit is the feeling of familiarity one has with the familiar course of action, where this feeling reveals a distinctive reason for acting in the usual way. I do this by considering and rejecting a popular account of habit's force in terms of habit's apparent automaticity, by arguing that one can do something out of habit and from deliberation, before going on to defend The Familiarity View.

Habits figure in action‐explanations because of their distinctive force. But what is the force of habit, and how does it motivate us? In this paper, I argue that the force of habit is the feeling of familiarity one has with the familiar course of action, where this feeling reveals a distinctive reason for acting in the usual way. I do this by considering and rejecting a popular account of habit's force in terms of habit's apparent automaticity, by arguing that one can do something out of habit and from deliberation, before going on to defend The Familiarity View.

When evaluating theories of causation, intuitions should not play a decisive role, not even intuitions in flawlessly-designed thought experiments. Indeed, no coherent theory of causation can respect the typical person’s intuitions in redundancy (pre-emption) thought experiments, without disrespecting their intuitions in threat-and-saviour (switching/short-circuit) thought experiments. I provide a deductively sound argument for these claims. Amazingly, this argument assumes absolutely nothing about the nature of causation. I also provide a second argument, whose conclusion is even stronger: the typical person’s causal intuitions are thoroughly unreliable. This argument proceeds by raising the neglected question: in what respects is information about intermediate and enabling variables relevant to reliable causal judgment?

Funder: Trinity College, University of Cambridge, The structuralist approach represents the relation between a model and physical system as a relation between two mathematical structures. However, since a physical system isprima facienota mathematical structure, the structuralist approach seemingly fails to represent the fact that science is about concrete, physical reality. In this paper, I take up thisproblem of lost realityand suggest how it may be solved in a purely structuralist fashion. I start by briefly introducing both the structuralist approach and the problem of lost reality and discussing the various (non-structuralist) solutions that have been proposed in the literature. Following this, I decompose the problem into theontological mismatchandspecificationproblems. In response to the former, I present ametascientific dissolution argument, according to which the difference in kind between mathematical structures and physical systems poses no deep obstacle to the structuralist approach, and consider some upshots of this argument for our views on representation. By way of conclusion, I argue that the metascientific dissolution argument paves the way for a solution to the specification problem as well.

Kelsen argued that any legal system claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of coercive force. Where there is law, Kelsen held, uses of force are prohibited unless they are specifically authorized by the law. Christoph Kletzer's reconstruction of the Pure Theory of Law offers a more austere picture of the relation between law and coercive force. According to Kletzer, the law regulates the use of force simply by permitting it. To make good on this claim, Kletzer must show that it is possible to give a satisfactory description of the workings of legal order in terms of permissions of the use of force alone. This paper argues that an account of legal order as austere as this cannot be given. The permissive operations of the law Kletzer takes to be fundamental presuppose a prior prohibition of unlawful uses of coercion.

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. I show that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-à-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. I further investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really prompts an inward turn as some interpreters have suggested.

Peer reviewed: True, Duncan Bell’s Empire, Race and Global Justice is an edited volume that makes an important intervention in philosophical debates about global justice. Its contributors argue that global justice scholarship has paid insufficient attention to the role of imperialism and racism in generating global hierarchies. This review considers the contributions of this volume from three perspectives: as a critique of the global justice literature, as a guide for what methods global justice scholars should use and as a reconsideration of what texts should be incorporated into the global justice canon. Empire is an important book for anyone who researches and teaches in the area of global justice because it demonstrates both why a different approach to this topic is necessary and how a different approach is possible.

The inequitable distribution of domestic and caring labour in different‐sex couples has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having both partners at home during the COVID‐19 pandemic would usher in a new era of equitable work and caring distributions. Contrary to these hopes, old patterns seem to have persisted. Moreover, studies suggest this inequitable distribution often goes unnoticed by the male partner. This raises two questions. Why do women continue to shoulder a disproportionate amount of housework and childcare despite economic and cultural gains? And why is there a widespread one‐sided misrepresentation within different‐sex couples about how domestic and caring work is distributed between the two partners? We answer these questions by appealing to affordance perception – the perception of possibilities for action in one's environment. We propose an important gender disparity in the perception of affordances for domestic tasks such as the dishwasher affording emptying, the floor affording sweeping and a mess affording tidying. We argue that this contributes not only to the inequitable distribution of domestic labour but to the frequent invisibility of that labour. We explore the consequences of this hypothesis for resistance and social change.

Funder: University of Sheffield, I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Can young children such as 3‐year‐olds represent the world objectively? Some prominent developmental psychologists—such as Perner and Tomasello—assume so. I argue that this view is susceptible to a prima facie powerful objection: To represent objectively, one must be able to represent not only features of the entities represented but also features of objectification itself, which 3‐year‐olds cannot do yet. Drawing on Burge's work on perceptual constancy, I provide a response to this objection and motivate a distinction between three different kinds of objectivity. This distinction helps advance current research on both objectivity and teleological action explanations in young children.

Ante rem structures were posited as the subject matter of mathematics in order to resolve a problem of referential indeterminacy within mathematical discourse. Nevertheless, ante rem structuralists are inevitably committed to the existence of indiscernible entities, and this commitment produces an exactly analogous problem. If it cannot be sorted out, then the postulation of ante rem structures is futile. In a recent paper, Stewart Shapiro argued that the problem may be solved by analysing some of the singular terms of mathematics not as genuinely referring expressions, but as instantial terms. In this paper, I discuss several competing accounts of the semantics of terms of this kind, and argue that they are all untenable for the ante rem structuralist. Shapiro, then, still owes us an account of the semantics of instantial terms that suits the ante rem structuralist project. Without it, the ante rem structuralist is still unable to determine the reference of the singular terms of mathematics.

Funder: studienstiftung des deutschen volkes; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004350, Funder: Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, How many correct logics are there? Monists endorse that there is one, pluralists argue for many, and nihilists claim that there are none. Reasoning about these views requires a logic. That is the meta-logic. It turns out that there are some meta-logical challenges specifically for the pluralists. I will argue that these depend on an implicitly assumed absoluteness of correct logic. Pluralists can solve the challenges by giving up on this absoluteness and instead adopt contextualism about correct logic. This contextualism is naturalistically appealing.

The best-known syntactic account of the logical constants is inferentialism . Following Wittgenstein’s thought that meaning is use, inferentialists argue that meanings of expressions are given by introduction and elimination rules. This is especially plausible for the logical constants, where standard presentations divide inference rules in just this way. But not just any rules will do, as we’ve learnt from Prior’s famous example of tonk, and the usual extra constraint is harmony. Where does this leave identity? It’s usually taken as a logical constant but it doesn’t seem harmonious: standardly, the introduction rule (reflexivity) only concerns a subset of the formulas canvassed by the elimination rule (Leibniz’s law). In response, Read [5, 8] and Klev [3] amend the standard approach. We argue that both attempts fail, in part because of a misconception regarding inferentialism and identity that we aim to identify and clear up.

Funder: Gates Cambridge Trust; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100005370, According to doxastic involuntarism, we cannot believe at will. In this paper, I argue that permissivism, the view that, at times, there is more than one way to respond rationally to a given body of evidence, is consistent with doxastic involuntarism. Rober (Mind 128(511):837–859, 2019a, Philos Phenom Res 1–17, 2019b) argues that, since permissive situations are possible, cognitively healthy agents can believe at will. However, Roeber (Philos Phenom Res 1–17, 2019b) fails to distinguish between two different arguments for voluntarism, both of which can be shown to fail by proper attention to different accounts of permissivism. Roeber considers a generic treatment of permissivism, but key premises in both arguments depend on different, more particular notions of permissivism. Attending to the distinction between single-agent and inter-subjective versions of permissivism reveals that the inference from permissivism to voluntarism is unwarranted.

Funder: Gates Cambridge Trust; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100005370, The existing literature on the rational underdetermination problem often construes it as one resulting from the ubiquity of objective values. It is therefore sometimes argued that subjectivists need not be troubled by the underdetermination problem. But on closer examination, it turns out, they should. Or so I will argue. The task of the first half of this paper is explaining why. The task of the second half is finding a subjectivist solution the rational underdetermination problem. The basic problem, I argue, is as follows. Idealizing subjectivism generates too many ideal selves to deliver determinate or commensurable options regarding what non-ideal deliberating agents ought to do. My solution: these idealized options should be assessed from the only perspective we can, in fact, occupy, namely, that of our non-ideal, actual selves. Deciding what to do therefore becomes, in part, an exercise in deciding who to be. But one might now worry this just moves the arbitrariness bump in the rug. Privileging the perspective of our actual self seems contrary to the rationale for idealizing in the first place. I consider two solutions to the problem, one democratic, the other modelled on trusteeship. In the end, I argue, our actual self has complete freedom to choose the ideal self it grants rational authority. In the final part of the paper, I present my positive proposal as a solution to the underdetermination problem confronting the idealizing subjectivist and then argue that, so understood, this account vindicates a tidied-up version of how some reflective people already do deliberate in their everyday lives. This, in turn, suggests that a decision-procedure closely connected to the account is both possible (because actual) and attractive.

Speaker authority can spring into existence via accommodation mechanisms: a speaker acts as if they had authority and they can end up obtaining it if nobody objects. Versions of this claim have been advanced by Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, Maciej Witek, and others. In this paper, I shift the focus from speaker to hearer authority. I develop a three-staged argument, according to which (i) felicity conditions for illocution can be recast in presupposition terms; (ii) just as certain illocutions require speaker authority, there are also illocutions requiring hearer authority; (iii) accommodation may provide a way to confer authority to one’s audience, rather than gain it for oneself. Speakers sometimes act as if their hearer had authority, and the hearer can end up obtaining it solely by playing along. In closing, I pause on the potentially problematic interplay between informal authority conferral and social norms of female deference to men.

Jon Elster has argued for the explanatory importance of two discrete emotions in political history: namely, the emotions of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘anger’. His argument forms part of a larger social phil...

Peer reviewed: True, Jeremy Bentham is usually seen as an anti-realist political thinker, or a proponent of what Bernard Williams has termed ‘political moralism’. This article questions that prevalent view and suggests instead that there are good grounds for considering Bentham a political realist. Bentham’s political thought has considerable commonalities with that of the sociologist and political realist Max Weber: both agree that politics is a unique domain of human activity defined by its association with power; that consequently, ethical conduct is unavoidably inflected by power in politics; that a commitment to truth in politics can only ever be contingent; and that politics has a set of basic conditions that it would be not only misguided but dangerous to attempt to transcend. Whilst it is often held that Bentham advanced a reductive framework for understanding politics, in fact, his utilitarianism was a far more realistic approach to political ends and means than has generally been acknowledged, and one that contemporary political theory realists would benefit from taking seriously.

If the Anthropocene describes human activity as a distinctive geophysical force, this activity has simultaneously emerged as enmeshed with the actions of all kinds of other beings. What are the consequences of this for an understanding of political agency? Should this be reserved for human beings, to underpin effective action in the face of ecological emergency? Or should this belief in human exceptionality itself be considered a factor in producing this emergency – in which case, should we expand our sense of meaningful agency to embrace the conjoint action of all manner of beings? This article addresses this question via a critical analysis of Bruno Latour’s account of the confrontations that characterize the Anthropocene. If Latour consciously mobilizes the language of war to describe these confrontations, the article argues that his writings repeatedly occlude the reality of the conflicts he invokes. After exploring other recent models of geo-political agency, the article concludes by proposing a model of political agency as both decisive and ontologically distributed: as not only ecologically plural, but also robust enough to fight for this plurality in the conflicts of the Anthropocene.

By mimicking the standard definition for a formal language, we define what it is for a natural language to be compact. We set out a valid English argument none of whose finite subarguments is valid. We consider one by one objections to the argument's logical validity and then dismiss them. The conclusion is that English—and any other language with the capacity to express the argument—is not compact. This rules out a large class of logics as the correct foundational one, for example any sound and complete logic, and in particular first-order logic. The correct foundational logic is not compact.

The proof in Dewar 2018 that classical and intuitionistic logic are not intertranslatable is defective. The proof claims that up to logical equivalence, there are only three non-trivial one-place schemata in intuitionistic logic (λφ.φ, λφ.¬φ and λφ.¬¬φ). This is false, for two reasons. First, we could include arbitrary further propositional constants in a one-place schema: for instance, the schema λφ.(φ∨P) is still a one-place schema. Second, even if we restrict our attention to one-place schemata that do not include any propositional constants, there are still infinitely many (logically inequivalent) schemata: this follows from the result of Nishimura (1960) that for any propositional constant, there are infinitely many intuitionistically inequivalent formulae containing only that propositional constant. However, the result still stands, as the following proof demonstrates.

Transparency has been proposed as a way of handling value-ladenness in machine learning (ML). This article highlights limits to this strategy. I distinguish three kinds of transparency: epistemic transparency, retrospective value transparency, and prospective value transparency. This corresponds to different approaches to transparency in ML, including so-called explainable artificial intelligence and governance based on disclosing information about the design process. I discuss three sources of value-ladenness in ML—problem formulation, inductive risk, and specification gaming—and argue that retrospective value transparency is only well-suited for dealing with the first, while the third raises serious challenges even for prospective value transparency.

It is widely acknowledged that high-level AI principles are difficult to translate into practices via explicit rules and design guidelines. Consequently, many AI research and development groups that claim to adopt ethics principles have been accused of unwarranted “ethics washing”. Accordingly, there remains a question as to if and how high-level principles should be expected to influence the development of safe and beneficial AI. In this short commentary I discuss two roles high-level principles might play in AI ethics and governance. The first and most often discussed “start-point” function quickly succumbs to the complaints outlined above. I suggest, however, that a second “cultural influence” function is where the primary value of high-level principles lies.

Whether I take some action that aims at desired consequence C depends on whether or not I take it to be true that if I so act, I will bring C about and that if I do not, I will fail to. And the action will succeed if and only if my beliefs are true. We argue that two theses follow: (I) To believe a conditional is to be disposed to infer its consequent from the truth of its antecedent, and (II) The conditional is true iff the inference would not make a true belief in the antecedent cause a false belief in the consequent.

This article gives an explicit presentation of Newtonian gravitation on the backdrop of Maxwell space-time, giving a sense in which acceleration is relative in gravitational theory. However, caution is needed: assessing whether this is a robust or interesting sense of the relativity of acceleration depends on some subtle technical issues and on substantive philosophical questions over how to identify the space-time structure of a theory.

Steven French’s new book is a bold and ambitious look at the question of what sorts of things scientific theories are—or rather, what they are not. For the purposes of this review, I’ll treat the book as divided into four parts, although many themes and ideas recur and re-emerge throughout. The first part (Chapters 1–2) concerns the structure of theories; the second (Chapter 3) concerns the representational character of theories; the third part (Chapters 4–6) considers the ontological status of theories; and the final part (Chapters 7–9) outlines and defends French’s positive thesis, that (as per the title) there are no such things as theories. I’ll say a little about each of the first two parts, and then discuss the third and fourth parts together.

Dans son Commentaire sur le Philebe de Platon, § 167-168, Damascius rapporte une serie d’objections a la these fameuse de Socrate dans le Philebe selon laquelle il existe des « plaisirs faux ». Ces objections furent formulees par Theophraste, l’eleve d’Aristote, peut-etre dans son livre en un volume Sur les plaisirs faux (DL 5.56). Dans cet article, je montre d’abord comment les critiques de Theophraste recourent aux ouvrages d’Aristote, et notamment a son analyse des differents types de faussete en Metaphysique Δ 29. Je montre ensuite comment Damascius defend Platon contre ces critiques en retournant les arguments d’Aristote, l’autorite sur laquelle Theophraste se fonde, contre Theophraste lui-meme. Ce faisant, Damascius atteste sa grande familiarite avec le corpus aristotelicien et montre que certains des textes que Theophraste convoque a l’appui de ses critiques peuvent etre mobilises pour defendre la position platonicienne.

Philosophical analysis of metaphor in the non-linguistic arts has been biased towards what I call the ‘aesthetic metaphor’: metaphors in non-linguistic art are normally understood as being completely formed by the work'sinternalcontent, that is, by its perceptual and aesthetic properties such as its images. I aim to unearth and analyse a neglected type of metaphor also used by the non-linguistic arts: the ‘artistic metaphor’, as I call it. An artistic metaphor is composed by an artwork's internal content, but also by itsexternalcontent, which is provided by the work's artistic properties such as its history. The artistic metaphor has been gestured at but not afforded a considered analysis; I aim to do this. Identifying the artistic metaphor has at least two benefits. It shows how curation plays a role in generating metaphors in artworks, which has been overlooked, and it illuminates a potentially powerful tool to interpret and understand ‘conceptual’ art.

It is often thought that the vindication of experimental work lies in its capacity to be revelatory of natural systems. I challenge this idea by examining laboratory experiments in ecology. A central task of community ecology involves combining mathematical models and observational data to identify trophic interactions in natural systems. But many ecologists are also lab scientists: constructing microcosm or ‘bottle’ experiments, physically realizing the idealized circumstances described in mathematical models. What vindicates such ecological experiments? I argue that ‘extrapolationism’, the view that ecological lab work is valuable because it generates truths about natural systems, does not exhaust the epistemic value of such practices. Instead, bottle experiments also generate ‘understanding’ of both ecological dynamics and empirical tools. Some lab-work, then, aids theoretical understanding, as well as targeting hypotheses about nature.

This paper highlights a use of analogies in science that so far has received relatively little systematic discussion: providing reasons for pursuing a model or theory. Using the development of the liquid drop model as a test case, I critically assess two extant pursuit worthiness accounts: (i) that analogies justify pursuit by supporting plausibility arguments and (ii) that analogies can serve as a guide to potential theoretical unification. Neither of these fit the liquid drop model case. Instead, I develop an alternative account, based on the idea that analogies facilitate the transfer of a well-understood modelling strategy to a new domain.

Semah is an Alevi ritual practice performed throughout Anatolia (Turkey) and the Alevi diaspora consisting of collective, dance-like movements that often take on or mimic the movements of animals, especially cranes. In attempting to elucidate that interplay between human performer and sacred animal, I draw on theoretical writings (especially philosophy and affect theory) about how people might – or might not – be able to become – or become like – other animals or forms of life, and what kind of affective processes that becoming might entail. I focus here especially on the role of semah in Sivas, Turkey, during the 1993 Pir Sultan Cultural Festival, during which Alevi participants, including many semah performers and musicians, were killed in an arson attack. Histories of that event highlight how prior to the attack, semah performers at the festival exemplified the possibility of becoming (like) cranes. Furthermore, many Alevis have placed semah at the centre of subsequent memorial events, suggesting new forms of affect and becoming as a political (and often public) response to the Sivas massacre.

Discussions of the role and legitimacy of elites in democratic societies have rarely taken the shape of debates about the internal organization and working of political parties. Except for Michels and Ostrogorski, the party has not received much attention from theorists interested in the elitist dimensions of democratic politics. In this article, I purport to look at the party as a battling ground for competing accounts of the role elites should play in modern democratic societies. However, I will not focus on theoretical analyses of the party. Rather, I will look at how political actors discussed the party in the context of the constituent debates at the Italian Constituent Assembly of 1946–1947. These debates do not explicitly deal with the role elites should play in democratic society. Instead, they center on whether and how the constitution should regulate political parties. Yet while discussing details of legal regulation, the constituents offered contrasting understandings of modern democracy, competing accounts of the role of the masses as well as of the elites, and creative attempts to create stable compromises between the two in a changing society. It is through the reconstruction of these rather practical debates that I aim to uncover how one of the main questions of modern democracy—the relation between elites and masses—has been dealt with politically. This, I suggest, is not only interesting for political or historiographical reasons, but also has theoretical relevance. Not only it directly speaks to recent debates about partisanship and intraparty deliberation, but it is also by looking at political institutions and the reasoning behind their creation that one can recover complex political thinking.1 This, I believe, is made particularly interesting by the fact that it results from long and complicated processes of negotiation of contrasting values as well as from the translation of political ideals into working institutional structures. Reconstructing these processes of negotiation and translation is what I plan to do in this article.

The practice of militant democracy reacts to a perceived weakness of democratic political systems: a democracy seems to allow for the abolition of democracy by democratic means. To counter this threat, some democratic political systems employ a practice of militant democracy, which restricts the rights of political participation and limits the freedom of association of those who aim to subvert democracy by democratic means. But militant democracy is open to the objection that democratic militancy is itself a violation of the democratic principle of political equality. Some authors, for example Hans Kelsen, therefore argue that a democracy can maintain its legitimacy only if it refuses to be militant, even if this carries the risk of the democratic abolition of democracy. This paper aims to show – with critical reference to Carl Schmitt’s conception of constitutional guardianship – that democratic militancy, despite appearances, does not conflict with democratic equality. Our obligation to extend equal rights of political participation to others is contingent on a condition of reciprocity: individuals or groups have a duty to treat others as political equals only if those others are themselves willing to respect democratic equality. Without this condition, our respect for the political rights of others would be open to be abused for our own enslavement. Democratic militancy targeted at anti-democrats who reject the condition of reciprocity is justifiable by our interest in avoiding subjection to unjust domination and doesn’t violate anyone’s political rights.

To what extent can Aquinas' philosophy of truth accommodate ambiguity? If an ambiguous object is that which exhibits multiple conflicting meanings, and truth, as ‘the conformity of thing and intellect', has its source and purpose in the divine, does the ambiguous lead us away from God? If so, how do we square this with the experience of the ambiguous, such as in art, that appears to draw us towards the divine? The paper explores this aporia by an analysis of the first two questions of De Veritate in conversation with Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics and Pickstock's Truth in Aquinas. Drawing on these three sources, truth is posited as a translation of being. However, it becomes clear that any translation is imperfect, given the difference between the medium of the existence of the thing and the medium of truth in the intellect. Hence, multiple, sometimes contradictory, propositions are needed in order to express the being of the thing. Moreover, it is shown how the ambiguous can prompt recursive returning to the singular, drawing us beyond merely identifying ‘what' a thing is, and beyond propositions, to share in the divine actualization of existence.

Malcolm Bull’s early work included Seeing Things Hidden (1999) and The Mirror of the Gods (2005), staging encounters with continental theory and the history of art. He supplemented this more scholarly writing with a series of essays for the London Review of Books, including a powerful piece on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001) that was published in that paper’s post-September 11th issue, dated 4th October, whose notoriety owes to some loose remarks by the Classicist Mary Beard but which stands out in the memory not only in virtue of Bull’s contribution but also because it contained a remarkable poem, ‘Pelagius’, by the late, great Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan. It is a body of work that makes sense in light of his institutional entanglements, teaching at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art on the one hand and a longstanding member of the editorial board of the New Left Review on the other. Over the last dozen years or so, however, Bull has been intruding more and more onto the territory of mainstream Anglophone political philosophy. There has still been important scholarship on art—Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth (2013) was a study of early eighteenth-century Neapolitan painting through eyes illuminated by the contemporary philosophy of Giambattista Vico who held the chair of rhetoric at the local University—but this is now accompanied by more straightforwardly political-theoretical writing than has appeared previously. The publication of Anti-Nietzsche (2011a), both bracing and salutary, marks the turn; the same year saw the publication of an article on egalitarianism in the New Left Review (2011b); more recently there has been a stimulating and idiosyncratic piece on ‘slack’ in Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith’s collection on Nature, Action and the Future (2018); and now we have a short book—or, as Bull refers to it, an essay—on the unfashionable subject of mercy.

Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000267, This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.

Many of my computer science students, and even some teaching colleagues, struggle to recognise the epistemological distinction between the words quantitative and objective. As they work on their research dissertations, inventing the software technologies that will become the basis of the next generation of mobile apps, social media start-ups, and internet infrastructure, they are cautioned that their design work must be evaluated quantitatively. This advice is taken very seriously, even where the goals of the project might be health (quantified), empathetic emotion (quantified), creative arts (quantified), or personal trust and security (naturally, quantified). The conflation of quantification with objectivity can lead to faintly ridiculous research conventions.

A.A. Long identifies a problem concerning the role of right reason (orthos logos) in Stoic ethics. Whilst an articulate account of both 1) the conditions of right reason’s attainment and 2) the means by which a moral agent can fulfil these conditions seems necessary to any bona fide Stoic ethics, the early Stoics, claims Long, offered up no such exposition. Although they seemingly possessed the theoretical resources to construct a normative account of rationality—namely, a robust conception of rationality as a constitutive feature of the human being to draw upon—the early Stoics instead relied on the non-existent ideal of the Sage in their scant remarks on right reason’s attainment, which led them into problems of circularity. In this thesis, I argue that, although the early Stoics may indeed fall victim to these problems, Epictetus offers in the Discourses an account of reason’s perfection that more adequately addresses Long’s concerns. I conclude that, whilst, like the early Stoics, he does not explicate the sufficient conditions for right reason’s attainment, Epictetus takes one of right reason’s necessary conditions (namely, consistency in judgment and action) and explicates the fulfillment of said condition in great detail. I argue this by first outlining what Epictetus takes to be the two primary features of the early Stoic conception of reason, namely, 1) preconceptions as conceptual content and 2) the capacity to make use of impressions. I then locate in the Discourses a multifaceted account of reason’s perfection that revolves around and exploits these two features. To judge and act consistently, one must purify one’s preconceptions of foreign, unnatural elements through dialectic, as well as articulate them as definitions through the study of philosophy and experience. Furthermore, the proper use of impressions consists in being non-precipitous in assent, consistently referring ordinary impressions to one’s articulated preconceptions as a standard of judgement, and developing a creative intelligence in the procedure of testing impressions. Whilst arguably still unsatisfyingly assumption-laden, as well as failing to address Long’s concerns in full, the moral epistemology I locate in Epictetus’ Discourses solves the problem of right reason in Stoicism more adequately than the early Stoic pedestalling of the Sage, and in a way that is nonetheless consistent with most core early Stoic doctrines.