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Martha Nussbaum's approach to ethical and political philosophy — unlike that of certain of her notable contemporaries — is neither ahistorical nor concerned with augmenting or refining the historical record. Rather, its aim is learning what the deepest philosophical minds of the past have proposed as the fairest organisation of society, in terms of a balance between autonomy for individuals and communities, and an equitable distribution of global resources. Whilst she argues fundamentally for cosmopolitanism — hence prioritises the latter — she struggles, in her later work, to accommodate the former within such a global socio-political model. I suggest this is because she presupposes that patriotism is antecedent to, and generative of, a cosmopolitan outlook, when in fact each of these political values is irreducible, and antithetical, to the other. Nussbaum supposes this, I propose, because her work focuses on the conceptual subtleties of intellectual history, which are sadly seldom mirrored in the brutal history of facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher‐order metaphysicians take facts to be higher‐order beings, i.e., entities in the range of irreducibly higher‐order quantifiers. In this paper, I investigate the impact of this conception of facts on the debate about the reality of tense. I identify two major repercussions. The first concerns the logical space of tense realism: on a higher‐order conception of facts, a prominent version of tense realism, dynamic absolutism, turns out to conflict with the laws of (higher‐order tense) logic. The second concerns our understanding of the positions occupying this logical space: on a higher‐order conception of facts, an attractive interpretation of the central tense realist notion of ‘facts constituting reality’ becomes unavailable. I discuss these results in the context of the more general project of higher‐order metaphysics and the (meta)metaphysics of time, drawing out their implications for the nature of the disputes both between realists and anti‐realists about tense and between different tense realist factions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the debate between absolutism and comparativism in the context of physical theories, particularly regarding the fundamental nature of quantities like mass and position. Topics include the challenges posed by symmetries in detecting absolute quantities, the historical context of the absolutism/comparativism debate, and the argument that comparativism fails to explain the empirical success of absolutist theories.

Though there has been much debate about whether Abelard's ethics are dangerously subjective or surprisingly absolutist, one thing is unanimous: they are intentionalist. The goal of this article is to parse out what should be meant by this claim, distancing his ethical account from the popular Kantian appraisal. Though much of the secondary literature on Abelard likens him to Kant, I argue that this is mistaken. For Abelard, an agent's intentions are informed by their affections—whether carnal or spiritual. This becomes clear when contextualizing Abelard's use of intentio with a view to his Commentary on Romans. Using the account of intention I suggest—one nuanced by Abelard's own theological commitments and biblical exegesis—it will be clear that Abelard's ethics is not a case for the moral neutrality of the passions nor an ethic of pure reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Property has a ubiquitous presence in international practice, but its implications for theorizing world order are not adequately explored. I remedy this by showing how property constitutes the core concepts of anarchy and sovereignty in international relations (IR) as overlapping spaces of right-based governance. I develop my account of a property-based world order in relation to the work of John Locke. Locke is generally overlooked as a core IR thinker, with the unfortunate consequence that anarchy and sovereignty are conceptualized as polar opposites under the enduring shadow of Hobbes. Even prominent critics of Hobbesian anarchy rely on Hobbesian notions of sovereignty, resulting in minimalist conceptions of international society and international ethics. To counter these Hobbesian legacies, I turn to Locke's limited, plural, and fluid accounts of anarchy and sovereignty and show how they are grounded in a normative notion of property that mutually constitutes them. This provides an alternative to the Hobbesian absolutist conceptions of anarchy and sovereignty that many IR theorists still operate with. The result is a distinctly normative vision for IR that condemns the twin evils of conquest and tyranny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relationships that Derrida establishes between three analytic discussions and three autoimmunities. The analytic discussions are (1) the antinomy of hospitality, related to what happens when the subject faces demands from strangers; (2) the antinomy of the death penalty, related to the meeting between the right to life and the right to end the life of another; (3) the antinomy of animality related to laws and what lies beyond them. The autoimmunities are (1) the autoimmunity of inclusion: democracy is open only to its sovereign citizens while it claims to welcome all who are excluded; (2) the autoimmunity of rights and liberties: in liberal democracy, rights and liberties are meant to challenge sovereignty's absolutism, but any attack on sovereignty is an attack on rights and liberties; (3) the autoimmunity of globalization: for democracy to work it requires protection provided by a supersovereignty, which limits the sovereignty of states, and hence, democracy. The paper follows Derrida's connections between the questions of hospitality, the death penalty, and animality on the one hand, and the autoimmune aspects of democratic politics on the other, to argue that his deconstruction of democracy is an ethicization of democracy activated by the concept of sovereignty, and a deconstruction of sovereignty via ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person's life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed, and that is untenable. An alternative approach seems more promising: let the values of such insignificant factors be bounded, as then there will be well-behaved tradeoffs between insignificant things and the risk to an innocent life. We argue, however, that bounding the values of insignificant factors poses myriad problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many states lack the standing capacity – housing, food, medical, or legal assistance – if thousands of people cross their border in one day. In addition, developing countries often lack the administrative capacity, expertise, and legal frameworks to process immigration or asylum applications and issue visas or refugee statuses. In response, the United Nations and other international organisations (IOs) propose to build the capacity of states through direct aid, training schemes, consultancies, twinning programmes, and start-up funds. The 2018 Global Compacts on Refugees (GCR) and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) were in part created with the mandates to 'build capacity' in designated states. This article examines how the meaning of capacity building has changed in migration management over the last 70 years. First, we present a brief history of capacity building and theorise capacity building as a form of intervention-lite that relies on the invitation by the host state and reaffirms an absolutist interpretation of sovereignty. The emerging norm of 'well-managed migration' asserts that if a state is not able to make migration safe, then the international community has a responsibility to provide resources and training to those national institutions. The article traces this logic of intervention-lite and the norm of 'well-managed migration' in the Global Compacts, particularly UNHCR Asylum Capacity Support Group and UN Network on Migration's capacity building mechanism. Methodologically, we draw on elite interviews, case studies, policy analysis, project workplans, evaluations, UN white papers and reports to examine the concept of 'capacity building' as framed in the Global Compacts and its implications for migration management and sovereignty. While the compacts affirm state responsibility for migration management, the GCR and GCM increase the capacity of international organisations to intervene in domestic institutions, rather than increase the capacity of national institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Le Maître Chat ou Le Chat Botté met en scène une ascension sociale étonnante : sur une idée de son chat, un pauvre fils de meunier se fait passer pour marquis auprès du roi, qui, dupe des ruses de l'animal, le reconnaît comme tel et lui offre la main de sa fille. Souvent présenté comme un texte explicitement moqueur voire dénonciateur des valeurs de la société d'Ancien Régime, Le Chat Botté est pourtant un conte ambigu : sa morale loue l'industrie et le savoir-faire d'un héros dont le seul mérite est d'avoir hérité d'un chat aux multiples talents. La présente étude interroge cette ambiguïté, jusque-là inexpliquée, à travers l'analyse de certains passages clés où l'ironie de Perrault prête au conte un sens tout autre que celui qu'on lui attribue généralement. Curieusement, il semblerait que la vraie gagnante de l'histoire soit la monarchie absolutiste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Motivated to bypass the twin basins of absolute relativism and dogmatic absolutism, an antinomic polarity into which thought tendentially falls, this paper offers various conceptual frameworks for overcoming antinomies in philosophical thought, and ultimately asserts that this overcoming occurs at a philosophical system's purported source: its active site of real genesis. The author traces a constellation of thinkers who all invoke this suspended thirdness in their own disciplinary and conceptual registers, from Jean Cavaillès to Gilles Châtelet, C.S. Peirce to Cécile Malaspina, ultimately and speculatively suggesting that this third space, the (abductive) hinge of real genesis, might precede and activate a priori the consequent diremptions into the polarities of the transcendental and the historical, the mathematical and the physical, the global and the local, the continuous and the discrete, the rational and the empirical, and so on. Such a genetic realism, then, places a radical exigency on philosophical thinking: to grasp its real genetic conditions, that is, without a previously given criterion or method. Ultimately, the paper is most interested in suggesting ways to reconfigure the conceptual landscape around this genetic tension or originating hinge, to encourage thought towards the genetic real and away from disciplinary stagnation, towards generative models for systematic thought itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans-Herbert Kögler offers an insightful analysis and a potent moral call to support the defence of Ukraine. This is a sensible moral position that I also share. However, I question Kögler's approach which overemphasises the ethical arguments alone. I argue that wars do not allow for moral absolutism of any kind and that the best one can do in the conditions of warfare is to endorse a version of contextual morality. Furthermore, I make a case for using the accumulated knowledge of historical sociology to understand the dynamics of war in Ukraine. Building on this knowledge one can advance a multipart argument that favours the continuous support for the defence of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jason Ralph's book, "On global learning: pragmatic constructivism, international practice and the challenge of global governance," offers ethical guidance for practitioners in a changing world. Ralph suggests that practical judgment based on human imagination and experimentalism should guide practices that serve the global public interest, rather than relying on abstract principles. He develops two normative tests to assess existing international practices and norms, and explores the problem-solving capacities of communities of practice in the areas of security, climate, and health. Ralph also emphasizes the importance of inclusivity, sympathy, and democratic methods in these communities. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the well-documented costs of word–deed misalignment, hypocrisy permeates our personal, professional, and political lives. Why? We explore one potential explanation: the costs of moral flexibility can outweigh the costs of hypocrisy, making hypocritical moral absolutism a preferred social strategy to admissions of moral nuance. We study this phenomenon in the context of honesty. Across six studies (total N = 3545), we find that communicators who take flexible honesty stances ("It is sometimes okay to lie") that align with their behavior are penalized more than hypocritical communicators who take absolute honesty stances ("It is never okay to lie") that they fail to uphold. Although few people take absolute stances against deception themselves, they are more trusting of communicators who take absolute honesty stances, relative to flexible honesty stances, because they perceive absolute stances as reliable signals of communicators' likelihood of engaging in future honesty, regardless of inconsistent behavior. Importantly, communicators—including U.S. government officials—also anticipate the costs of flexibility. This research deepens our understanding of the psychology of honesty and helps explain the persistence of hypocrisy in our social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we are trying to show that in the postmodern era, by questioning the ontological foundations of theology and rejecting absolutism and embracing pluralism and relativism, religious education has been placed in an anti-realistic postmodern framework. This type of education and training tries to replace the horizontal and context-oriented or local view by rejecting the vertical-oriented view in traditional and modern education and training, in which transcendental and absolute values are accepted, and this is the method of deconstructing this type of education and training that has been proposed under the influence of postmodern philosophers such as Derrida. This type of education is expanding and growing in the 21st century. But this approach itself also faces problems that cannot be completely general. Negation of the essence and nature of religion, failure to recognize the essence of religion, considering religious experience to be historical and local, etc. in this approach indicates its insufficiency in its complete spread throughout the world. Therefore, it seems that critical education is a suitable alternative to post-modern religious education in order to familiarize students with the nature and essence of religion and to accept pluralism and contextualism in their own education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article analyses the development of the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Slovakia, Czechia and Slovenia in the frame of expert, political and administrative narratives. The argumentative part mainly focuses on the development of the narrative in Slovenia and uses the examples from the Czech Republic and Slovakia as the reference frame. Information was collected from the various national media outlets and organized into the comparative time frames and compared with the epidemiological data. Slovenian inconsistencies in communication patterns developed into the complete disintegration of the pandemic crisis management and into the struggle for the supremacy of personal political agenda. As a case study, the article shows the constructivist relativism through the comparison of data and government-media narrative. Thus, the article addresses the issues of relativism on the one hand and of narrative absolutism on the other. The main aim is a critical presentation of "a crisis event" in connection to the government authorities spin on an event according to their political goals. The given case, due to a rather short period, strong media coverage and high data availability, shows inconsistencies of epidemiological data interpretation, resulting in multiple realities, causing multiple responses that paralysed effective decision-making as well as effective policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Absolutism—the idea that some kinds of acts are absolutely wrong and must never be done—plays an important role in medical ethics. Nicholas Denyer has defended it from some influential consequentialist critics who have alleged that absolutism is committed to "agent-relative constraints" and therefore intolerably complex and messy. Denyer ingeniously argues that, if there are problems with agent-relative constraints, then they are problems for consequentialism, since it contains agent-relative constraints, too. I show that, despite its ingenuity, Denyer's argument does not succeed. The defense of absolutism must move to other grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an unexamined paradox in the history of government in the West. The so-called absolutist monarchs of Europe overwhelmingly chartered republican corporations—e.g., towns, universities, and guilds whose members elected their leaders. Indeed, modern constitutional democracy is patterned after them. Yet, modern democracies themselves have overwhelmingly chartered authoritarian corporations—e.g., universities and business corporations whose subjects have no vote. After this Great Inversion, corporations, which once distributed power and wealth, now concentrate them, straining constitutional democracy. Against this backdrop, this article analyzes the major types of relation maintained between states and corporations: constitutive (states charter corporations), mimetic (states and corporations recurrently copy one another's organizational features), and instrumental (each leans on the other, and sometimes captures it, to better advance its own purposes). The article then examines the special challenges that corporate economies pose to constitutional democracy and considers whether a partial reversal of the Great Inversion could reduce them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay addresses the rise of what we elect to call 'the religious left'. Documenting the collapse between radicality and religiosity as identity politics embraces moral absolutism, the essay offers a critique of the culture wars and the ensuing flight from political confrontation. Attending in particular to the failures of the left, which we recognise as being a failure of the political imagination, so we turn a critical eye on claims of authenticity and the accelerated embrace of narratives of vulnerability and victimisation in a post-liberal world. The result is an inward-looking political imaginary, which is as suffocating as it is debilitating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the challenges of polarization and cynicism, exploring themes of racial satire, moral absolutism and the power of comedy to challenge social norms. Topics discussed include the historical context of racial satire in American culture; the evolution of cynicism from Enlightenment critique to modern intellectual discourse; and the role of satire in disarming cynicism and promoting critical engagement with complex issues.

This paper offers a comparative analysis of two 19th century texts of political advice, ethics and kingship composed at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia, respectively in the Buddhist court of Konbaung Burma and the Hinduized milieu of the Tai-Ahom kingdom of Assam. The first text, Rajadhammasangaha, a treatise on kingship and polity in Burmese, was penned in 1878 by U Hpo Hlaing, a prominent courtier, minister and intellectual in King Mindon's entourage, purportedly as a guide for the potential reforms and "righteous" kingly conduct in the government of the Kingdom of Burma as a young Thibaw-min, the last Burmese monarch, was just installed on the throne as Mindon's successor. The second text, Nitilatankur was composed sometime in the first decade of the 19th century by a court poet named Bagis Sarma under the patronage of an Ahom military general. The two texts were embedded and encoded in two interrelated but divergent frameworks of kingship: one, the Buddhist dharmaraja, righteous kingship, and the other, the Brahmanical devaraja, divinised kingship. This study argues that while the Burmese text outlined a revolutionary proposal for devolution of chakravarti kingship into a form of constitutional monarchy and abolition of kingly absolutism drawing on the contractual nature of Budadhist kingship and global constitutionalist ideas, the Assamese text was a classic advice manual for ensuring the sustenance of chakravarti kingship in a Brahmanical polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Ignatieff, it is both foolish and dangerous to look forward to an era beyond state sovereignty, not least because the chief threat to human rights comes from failed states, civil war and anarchy. As [4], pp. 35-36) has argued, instead of regarding state sovereignty as at best an anachronism in a globalized world and at worst the chief danger to human rights, the need to appreciate the state system as the basis of international order has presented itself afresh. "Reason of State" as an Organizing Stance for the World as we Find It. [Extracted from the article]

Focusing on the ideological and worldview premises of moral reasoning, our study (N = 313) has as a starting point the well-known relationship between morality and distributive justice norms. We examined the serially mediating role of progressiveness on morality, moral absolutism, and consistency norm on the relationship between ideological/worldview perspectives and distributional criteria. Three groups of respondents were formed based on participants' ideological and worldview perceptions and then serial mediation analysis was conducted. The present findings suggest that morality is predicted by ideology and worldview and predicts attitudes toward the norms of equity and welfare chauvinism, through moral absolutism and interpretations of consistency norm, thus confirming our hypothesis. Moderate Passive Individualists emerged as the group who adopts the most progressive and inclusive attitude towards moral evaluations and practices, while Demobilized Collectivists and Neoliberals maintain a more conservative attitude towards issues that are subjected to moral framing. Our findings shed light on the crucial role of consistency norm, which has not received enough attention until now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article discusses the symbolism of the year 1830 in the transition from the old political order to the establishment and gradual consolidation of the modern Belgian state. Modern constitutionalism was characterized by the struggle against monarchical absolutism and the concentration of political power in the hands of a single person. In addition, it supported the respect of civil rights and liberties, the individual being at the center of liberal philosophy, along with the idea of a representative government, the separation of powers in the state and the supremacy of the rule of law. The spread of the revolutionary wave from 1830 throughout the country opened a new period in the history of Belgium, in which the ideas of centralizing the state and asserting national independence merged with the urgency to give a direction to the state by choosing the representative monarchy as a form of governance and with the introduction of the Senate as an intermediate power. By analyzing the Belgian deputies’ speeches, this article aims to make an introduction in the way the deputies imagined the construction of the state and to advance the idea of a mutual trajectory of the Belgian society in accordance with the young European nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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What is the epistemological significance of deep disagreement? Part I explored the nature of deep disagreement, while Part II considers its epistemological significance. It focuses on two core problems: the incommensurability and the rational resolvability problems. We critically survey key responses to these challenges, before raising worries for a variety of responses to them, including skeptical, relativist, and absolutist responses to the incommensurability problem, and to certain steadfast and conciliatory responses to the rational resolvability problem. We then pivot to the ethical and political dimensions of deep disagreement. We focus on whether an unwillingness to engage with positions one considers to be immoral or repugnant might be good, and conclude with some reflections on the moral risks of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a being that discovers its ontological world, searching for its essence, while also preserving human sociality. It is the thinking ability of every human being that liberates the ontology of the world (s)he experiences, the teleology of the ideal world, through meanings. Society has changed in that time/space in people's perceptions of their own externality the abstract/concrete are constructed by arguments. Ideal facts, relative values are in reality; human/society phenomenon, knowledge/conscience awareness. The dialectical process between the deterministic understanding that fixes the freedom of human will in the cause relation and the factual reality created by human perception continues to be a matter of debate. Things in the universe, the subject in the consciousness of sensory/mental is included as when the material reality precedes the intellectual reality. Critical thinking of the problem of reality with the knowledge of existence in the context of subject and object is possible not only with the perception by social consciousness but also internalized by the individual of consciousness. The mind is subjective phenomena in which the absolute truth in the sign structure is connected to the ideas. The cultural elements obscure the whole meaning of what can be called an object-inherent truth, in indirect processing. In this article, conceptually, the phenomena of Relativism / Absolutism will be examined in the reality of Idealism / Materialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper presents Amartya Sen's challenge to popular liberal egalitarian theories (utilitarianism, well--being, and John Rawls' "primary goods"). It explores the alternative posed by Sen and Martha Nussbaum to those Theories: the capability approach. The challenge is twofold: the first revealing that the indicators used by said theories (a) do not yield the measured outputs required for assessments and comparisons, and (b) imply inconsistencies within their respective systems. The second, theoretic, challenge, argues that these theories fail to address what is needed, namely, how outputs actually affect agents. The paper thus presents the 'Capability Approach,' commenting on the differences between Sen and Nussbaum regarding what the latter calls 'Basic Entitlements', and on what freedom means. This account is preceded by Sen's argument against absolutist models of Justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cornelius Castoriadis's entire work has been all along devoted to pursuing a vehement critique of all kinds of ontological foundation of political institution. His fostering of the radically social-historical characters of collectivity has been constantly played against the aspiration to base contingency upon absolute precepts. Nevertheless, as I attempt to show in this paper, his institutional theory, while freeing itself from ontological absolutes, risks being haunted by another kind of absolutism, one of democratic outline. Such an absolutistic seduction, in my view, takes the form of a strong, all too strong defense of direct democracy and radical autonomy as well as rejection of political representation. As a consequence, Castoriadis's discourse can be viewed as inhabited by a structural contradiction: while the search for an originary purity is discarded at the ontological level, it shows its phantasmatic perpetuation in the realm of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reconceptualizes fanaticism as an activity that does not rely on the condemnation of 'fanatical' acts as a priori 'irrational.' Rather, it theorizes fanaticism as a method of ethical and political critique against a regime of representation. It also argues that it is crucial to understand fanaticism through an approach that does not set up a dichotomy between affect and reason, disavowing the 'irrational' behavior of fanatics. Drawing on affect theory and particularly the entanglement of feeling-thinking, this paper emphasizes that fanaticism is better understood within a framework that takes seriously the role of affects. Such a conceptual framework has important pedagogical implications for how to address fanaticism in education. This essay suggests that it is crucial to invent pedagogical strategies that are rooted in a reconceptualized notion of fanaticism that pays attention to its ethical, political and affective dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the natural law is the source of the binding force of human laws, a person who transgresses human laws is liable not only to the consequences of crime which these laws prescribe, but also to those consequences which cause fear in his conscience. If the right is a real right, a I ius in rem i , this power is a I consequence i of the original direct power over the I substance i of the thing, and if the right is a personal right, a I ius in personam i , this right of compulsory execution is its very essence. And this is how they are in fact confirmed: 1. because of the social contract; 2. by conforming to the primary precepts of natural law in the state of nature in the sense that they do not prescribe what natural law prohibits. natural law decrees that rights must not be violated, but it allows for secular law to determine more specifically the conditions for a right to exist. The difference is due to a change in the concept of a right NATURAL LAW THEORY Natural law theory shown to be directly derived from Stoicism I Recta ratio i and God's will I Iustum i I Positive law - an extension of natural law, determined by the interests of a particular society i Natural law theory goes beyond Stoicism in its concept of a right as a I facultas i or I qualitas moralis activa i The discrepancy within natural law theory between the Stoic and the new concept of a right The meaning of I obligatio i in natural law theory: moral duty. CONTENTS I Translator's introduction i I Author's preface i I abbreviations i INTRODUCTION The concept of legal obligation in private law The derivation of this concept of obligation in private law from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural law theory THE ROMAN VIEW The Roman concept of I dominium i does not imply a duty of respect. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents the discussion on probing exploration of the moral relations to the other animals. Topics include having eating as a final good seems in part to be a matter of apprehending the food as in some way to-be-consumed; and endorsing such laws enabling a rational individual in developing a reflective conception of the good.

The article focuses on issues about our characterization of relativism by outlining a cluster of core features of instances of moral relativism. Topics discussed include methodology of attempting to capture the key features and variations of relativism, meta-philosophical view of equal validity (EV) and non-neutrality (NN) and morality and empirical knowledge.

Josiah Royce is remembered mainly as an absolute idealist. Through his confrontation with "Bradley's regress", this paper will show that he was actually trying to combine a bold form of monism with a pluralism of real, discrete individuals. His commitment to the actual infinite is used both to turn Bradley's regress into the generative mechanism of individuality within the Absolute, and to abolish the ontological difference between the Absolute itself and the individuals it contains. The "flat absolutism" resulting from this operation will be compared to the contemporary "flat ontologies" of Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, whose pluralism and commitment to "external" relations are shown to be just some of the ways in which a robust sense of individuality can be defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present study investigates the combination of an epistemological sensitization and two different critical thinking instructions, i.e., the general and infusion approach, in the context of epistemological change induced by the presentation of resolvable scientific controversies. In a randomized study, we tested the hypothesis that the presentation of resolvable controversies generally reduces absolutism and multiplicism and increases evaluativism. We assume that these effects are strongest when the controversies are presented with an epistemological sensitization and the infusion approach. The results indicate an increase in absolutism when the general approach is employed without an epistemological sensitization. Combined with an epistemological sensitization, the increase in absolutism is only detected when the infusion approach is used. Concerning multiplicism, there is a reduction in all conditions, but the reduction is more effective without an epistemological sensitization. The general approach yields a larger increase in evaluativism without an epistemological sensitization, while the infusion approach fosters evaluativism only in combination with the sensitization. However, an argumentation task revealed that the desired level of an evaluativist argumentation only seems to emerge without an epistemological sensitization in combination with the infusion approach. In sum, the results show that there is no general way to reduce absolutism and multiplicism and increase evaluativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Martinich has long worried about how Hobbes can consistently theorize sovereign-making covenants, and how those can be reconciled with various Biblical covenants. The inference that because some contemporary interpreters of Hobbes understood his theory to mean X, Hobbes's theory did mean X, or Hobbes intended it to mean X, is not supported by any sound theory of interpretation. Martinich worries that Hobbes should, but concludes that he cannot because the Biblical accounts do have God as a party to some covenants, and Hobbes's Christian readers would find implausible any attempt to reinterpret those covenants otherwise. [Extracted from the article]