Books on the topic 'Normative pragmatism'
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1
Cochran, Molly. Normative theory in international relations: A pragmatic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1999.
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Cochran, Molly. Normative theory in international relations: A pragmatic approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Koons, Jeremy Randel, and Michael P. Wolf. Normative and the Natural. Springer International Publishing AG, 2016.
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Koons, Jeremy Randel, and Michael P. Wolf. The Normative and the Natural. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
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Cochran, Molly. Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (Cambridge Studies in International Relations). Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Minteer, Ben A. Environmental Ethics, Sustainability Science, and the Recovery of Pragmatism. Edited by Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199941339.013.46.
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The recent emergence of sustainability science has created opportunities and challenges for environmental ethics. On the one hand, the fast growth and increasing influence of sustainability science in environmental management and policy circles—and its normative character as a goal-directed enterprise focused on moving society toward a more durable socio-ecological relationship—provides an opening for environmental ethics to contribute to the development of this new transdisciplinary science. Yet traditional (and historically dominant) nonanthropocentric ethics will prove difficult to reconcile with sustainability science’s strong emphasis on the anthropocentric goals of improving human welfare and well-being. A more explicitly pragmatic understanding of environmental ethics, a view that combines respect for nature with a wider sense of value pluralism (including more human-directed values) in the cautious shaping of ecological systems for conservation and human benefit, has the potential to draw the two fields closer together at this critical stage in their developmental trajectories.
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Sepielli, Andrew. Pragmatist Quietism. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192856500.001.0001.
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Abstract Pragmatist Quietism argues that there are objective ethical truths that neither require nor admit of a vindication or foundation from domains outside of ethics—metaphysics, semantics, epistemology, and so on. First, it argues that normative-ethical debates are similar in important ways to debates that philosophers call ‘merely verbal’; the key difference is that the former influence action and affect in a way that the latter do not. It then uses this set of features to explain why there are objective ethical truths that don’t need or allow for extra-ethical vindication, but also why it can sometimes seem as though ethics is not objective. This explanation of ethical objectivity without foundations is a distinctly pragmatist one, where pragmatism is the approach to inquiry and explanation on which we endeavour to guide our beliefs by considerations of value rather than by the accurate representation of the world. The meta-ethical outlook is then applied to issues in moral epistemology, including disagreement, and debunking arguments.
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Silk, Alex. Normative Language in Context. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805076.003.0009.
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This chapter develops a contextualist account of normative language, focusing on broadly normative readings of modal verbs. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the discourse properties of normative language from a contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with principles of interpretation and conversation. In using normative language, interlocutors can exploit their grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to manage an evolving system of norms. Discourse Contextualism provides a perspicuous framework for further philosophical theorizing about the nature of normativity, normative language, and normative judgment. Delineating these issues can help refine our understanding of the space of overall theories and motivate more fruitful ways the dialectics may proceed. Discourse Contextualism provides a linguistic basis for a more comprehensive theory of normativity and normative discourse and practice.
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Potter, Vincent G. Charles S. Peirce. Fordham University Press, 1996. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823217090.001.0001.
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In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce's concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived. This book argues that Peirce's doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce's philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. The book shows that Pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. It combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and deals with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce's thought. It shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce's pragmatism, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the “ideal” dimension of reality has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.
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Bonevac, Daniel. The Putnamian Argument, (O) The Argument from Reference, and (P) The Kripke-Wittgenstein Argument from Plus and Quus. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190842215.003.0014.
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This chapter examines three of Alvin Plantinga’s arguments for the existence of God: the Putnamian argument (or the argument from global skepticism), the argument from reference, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein argument from plus and quus. They begin with skeptical arguments against the possibility of knowledge, reference, or content and convert them into arguments for God’s existence. The key idea behind these arguments is that content and the knowledge of it are infinitary and normative. These features of content make it impossible to account for a speaker’s content, since a finite being’s dispositions are finite. Content requires a non-naturalistic relation to an infinite set of finite minds or to an infinite mind. The only options for accounting for content are pragmatism and theism. If pragmatism fails, then theism is the only remaining option.
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Rondel, David. Pragmatist Egalitarianism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190680688.001.0001.
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Pragmatist Egalitarianism argues that a deep impasse plagues philosophical egalitarianism, and sets forth a conception of equality rooted in American pragmatist thought that successfully mediates that impasse. The book argues that there is a division within egalitarianism between those who regard equality as a fundamentally distributive ideal and those who construe it as a normative conception of human relationships. These rival conceptions are referred to as “vertical” and “horizontal” egalitarianism, respectively. Despite their close connection, these ideals may come apart. And yet, so much philosophical writing on equality is marked by what looks like a zero-sum competition for the same conceptual turf, as if the whole truth about equality must be captured by a single idea or an exclusive set of principles. One of the book’s core arguments is that we should reject the central premises upon which such disagreement turns: that equality is a single idea, that it has a fundamental locus, and that there is a singular or primary route to the achievement of a genuinely egalitarian society. The pragmatist view the book sets forth recasts egalitarianism in light of three mutually reinforcing variables—the institutional, the personal, and the cultural—each of which is best accentuated in one of a trio of pragmatists, John Dewey, William James, and Richard Rorty. If the three variables are mutually complicit in promoting inequality, an egalitarianism that takes this seriously will treat all three as equally (though differently) important in making things better.
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Richardson, Henry. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190247744.003.0012.
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This concluding chapter restates the book’s central arguments in a simple, linear order, highlighting its conclusions about the nature of the moral community, the proper analysis of dyadic rights and duties, and the possibility of moral authority. It explains how this argument clears away a threshold objection to constructive ethical pragmatism (CEP) and how the book’s accounts of practical intelligence, moral psychology, and objectivity further support this normative ethical view. It considers how the central argument might be extended by dropping the assumption that moral authority is limited to specifying objective moral norms and by relaxing the expository focus on cases of two intelligent individuals working things out together at the input stage. Against the former of these broadenings, it notes the value of the way that the account, as developed, enables us to reconcile morality’s possibly eternal objective core with the possibility of our contingently adding to its objective content.
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Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. Oxford University Press, 2014.
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Finlay, Stephen. Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2017.
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Gallagher, Shaun. Enactivist Interventions. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794325.001.0001.
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Enactivist Interventions explores central issues in the contemporary debates about embodied cognition, addressing interdisciplinary questions about intentionality, representation, affordances, the role of affect, and the problems of perception and cognitive penetration, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. It argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology, and cognitive science. It interprets enactivism as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Enactivist Interventions argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. It thus argues for a continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. It also discusses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body, and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social, and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in the world, situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental, and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.
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Gardiner, Stephen M., and Allen Thompson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199941339.001.0001.
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Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains forty-five newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices. The essays range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics. The Handbook includes sections on the broad social contexts in which we find ourselves (e.g., chapters on history, science, economics, governance, and the Anthropocene), on what ought to count morally and why (e.g., chapters on humanity, animals, living individuals, ecological collectives, and wild nature), on the nature and meaning of environmental values (e.g., truth and goodness, practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics), on theoretical understandings of how we should act (e.g., on consequentialism, duty and obligation, character, caring relationships, and the sacred), on key concepts (e.g., responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and sustainability), on specific areas of environmental concern (e.g., pollution, population, energy, food, water, mass extinction, technology and ecosystem management), on climate change considered as the defining environmental problem of our time (e.g., chapters on mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and geoengineering), and on social change (e.g., pragmatism, conflict, sacrifice, and action).
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Zimmerman, Aaron Z. Pragmatic Self-Deception. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809517.003.0006.
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To conclude the discussion, the author turns to James’s defense of the will to believe. Philosophers have tended to focus on the normative question of whether it is ever OK to adopt beliefs for pragmatic reasons. The “evidentialists” are prepared to criticize those who would resort to this sort of thing, and the intellectualists go further to argue that pragmatists are self-deceived. The author argues against these epistemic scolds. The social science of “positive illusions” confirms the coherence of James’s doctrine and provides an evidential basis for Bain’s theory of belief. Sometimes, we can ignore the evidence and believe what we want to believe knowing full well that this is what we are doing. The will to believe is real. Within limits, it can even be a good thing.
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Richardson, Henry. Articulating the Moral Community. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190247744.001.0001.
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As this highly original work explains, morality is not fixed objectively, independently of all human judgment, nor is it something that we “invent.” Rather, working within zones of objective indeterminacy, the moral community—the community of all persons—has the authority to introduce new moral norms. These further specify the preexisting moral norms, making an objective difference to individuals’ moral rights and duties. The moral community, so-called, could not exercise authority unless it had some structure whereby it could act. Unlike political communities, which are centralized, noninclusive, and backed by coercion, the moral community is decentralized and inclusive. Its structure depends upon dyadic duties—ones that one individual owes to another. Such duties, the book argues, empower efforts by individuals to work out intelligently with one another how to respond to morally important concerns. The innovative moral input that these efforts can provide is initially authoritative only over the parties involved. Yet when such innovations gain sufficient uptake and have been reflectively accepted by the moral community, they become new moral norms. This account of the moral community’s moral authority is motivated by, and supports, a type of normative ethical theory, constructive ethical pragmatism (CEP), which rejects the consequentialist claim that rightness is to be defined as a function of goodness and the deontological claim that principles of right are fixed independently of the good. Rather, it holds instead that what we ought to do is fixed by our continuing efforts to specify the right and the good in light of each other.
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Rahmani, Masoumeh. Drifting through Samsara. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197579961.001.0001.
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Goenka’s Vipassana movement is distinguished for its consistent refusal to identify as Buddhist and its rich rhetorical repertoire for repackaging Theravada Buddhist teachings in pseudo-scientific and secular language. This book is an in-depth qualitative study of Goenka’s movement in New Zealand. It illustrates the implication of the movement’s discourse on shaping unique processes and narratives of conversion and disengagement. It argues that conversion to this movement is tacit and paradoxically results in the members’ rejection of religious labels and categories. The book subsequently examines disengagement in the context of tacit conversion, outlining three pathways: (1) pragmatic leaving, (2) disaffiliation, and (3) deconversion. Pragmatic leavers refer to individuals who disengaged prior to developing a commitment and their language is characterised by pragmatisms, dualistic discourse, and ambivalence, and their post-disengagement involves an active gravitation towards practices with easily accomplished goals. Disaffiliates and deconverts are individuals who disengaged after years of intense commitment to the movement. One of the distinguishing features of disaffiliation narratives is self-doubt resulting from the movement’s ambiguous discourse regarding progress, and that post-disengagement often involves the retrospective adoption of the Buddhist identity. The book argues that consequential to its linguistic strategies as well as the movement’s relation to the host culture, deconversion from this movement is a rare exit pattern. The book thus also questions the normative participant recruitment approach in conversion studies and argues that a simple reliance on the informants’ identification or rejection of categories fails to encompass the tonalities of conversion in the contemporary spiritual landscape.
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Kim, Sungmoon. Democracy after Virtue. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190671235.001.0001.
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In the past two decades contemporary Confucian political theory has been propelled by the dialectical conversation between Confucianism and democracy and, more recently, between Confucian democracy and Confucian meritocracy. However, the absence of a shared point of reference in developing Confucian democratic theory has made it extremely difficult to understand whether the disagreement between Confucian democrats and Confucian meritocrats is merely a political one or is also of philosophical significance. Democracy after Virtue explores a normative Confucian democratic theory that justifies democracy on pragmatic grounds, both as a political system and as a way of life in East Asia, with special attention to Confucianism, a dominant cultural tradition in the region, as well as to the value pluralism and moral conflict that increasingly characterize the circumstances of East Asian politics. It presents “pragmatic Confucian democracy” as a fresh normative framework that can help (1) identify the social circumstances that require a democracy as a political system in a Confucian society, (2) explain the internal connection between two dimensions of democracy that are commonly presented in political science as being at odds with each other, (3) make sense of the value of democracy coherently with reference to its two dimensions, (4) illuminate the theoretical connection between democratic procedures and the outcomes they produce, and (5) articulate distinctively Confucian democratic principles of justice in criminal punishment, economic distribution, and international relations (humanitarian intervention in particular) from a pragmatic standpoint.
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Yalcin, Seth. Expressivism by Force. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738831.003.0015.
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There is on the one hand the traditional speech act-theoretic notion of illocutionary force, and there is on the other hand the kind of notion of force we have in mind when we are theorizing in formal pragmatics about conversational states and their characteristic modes of update. These notions are different, and occur at different levels of abstraction.They are not helpfully viewed as in competition.The expressivist idea that normative language is distinctive in force can be developed in two sorts of directions, depending on which of the two senses of ’force’ is emphasized. I suggest expressivists do better to take the path stressing conversational update: they do better to start with the idea that normative discourse is distinctive in respect of its dynamic effect on the state of the conversation.
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Finlay, Stephen. Disagreement Lost and Found. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805076.003.0008.
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According to contextualist and other content-relativist views in metaethics, different speakers use the same moral and normative sentences to say different things. These views face a classic problem of Lost Disagreement, which they attempt to solve by identifying pragmatic, non-content-based kinds of disagreement. This chapter critically compares two broad strategies of this kind, (1) quasi-expressivist views that analyze disagreement over whether S ought to do A in terms of conflicting attitudes towards S doing A, and (2) metalinguistic views that analyze such disagreement in terms of conflicting attitudes towards how to talk about S’s doing A. While the main objection to quasi-expressivist views (concerning the felicity of semantic negation markers like “wrong,” “incorrect,” and “false”) fails, objections to metalinguistic views are argued to be decisive. Content-relativists should be quasi-expressivists about fundamental normative disagreement.
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Reisner, Andrew. Pragmatic Reasons for Belief. Edited by Daniel Star. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199657889.013.31.
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In some circumstances, a wedge may be driven between what is advantageous or beneficial to believe and what is true. Cases range from the exotic—with diabolical forces conspiring to punish a hapless victim for believing the truth—to the mundane—with excessive optimism increasing one’s chances of success at some tasks. In contemporary discussions about normative reasons for belief, it is often argued or assumed that all reasons for belief arise only from epistemological considerations. This chapter assesses the case for the contrary claim: that there are genuine pragmatic reasons for belief. The chapter begins with a discussion of the standard arguments for and against non-ecumenical evidentialism. After concluding that case for non-ecumenical evidentialism is tenuous, the chapter canvasses and assesses the diverse range of arguments in favor of there being pragmatic reasons for belief.
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Smith, Holly M. Pragmatic Responses to the Problem of Error. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199560080.003.0004.
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Chapter 4 examines ideal Pragmatic Responses to the problem of nonmoral error: responses which seek to identify a normatively acceptable moral code that is universally usable by all agents. Some proposed ideal codes are objectivized (an act’s rightness depends on its objective features), whereas others are subjectivized (an act’s rightness depends on the features its agent believes it to have). An ideal Pragmatic code would fulfill at least some of the conceptual and goal-oriented rationales for requiring a code to meet the Usability Demand. The most promising candidate code is the moral laundry list, which consists of a list of individual actions, each described in terms the agent can unerringly apply. However, since no agent has the knowledge to identify the correct moral laundry list, the chapter finds no Pragmatic Response that provides an effective remedy for the problem of error.
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Calhoun, Cheshire. What Good Is Commitment? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190851866.003.0005.
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This chapter critically evaluates the commonplace idea that people not only will, but ought to, make commitments, and that it is good for the individual to do so. The chapter briefly raises doubts about the defensibility of the normative pressure to commit, and then suggests that commitment may be only one style of managing one’s diachronic existence. Then, the author examines how making commitments differs from merely intending and provisionally planning. There follows a detailed critique of the principal philosophical defenses of the value of commitment, including both pragmatic and better-life arguments. The chapter concludes with an explanation of what makes commitment attractive for many persons, if not universally so.
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Alexandrova, Anna. A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199300518.001.0001.
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Well-being, happiness, and quality of life are now established objects of social and medical research. Does this science produce knowledge that is properly about well-being? What sort of well-being? The definition and measurement of these objects rest on assumptions that are partly normative, partly empirical, and partly pragmatic, producing a great diversity of definitions depending on the project and the discipline. This book, written from the perspective of philosophy of science, formulates principles for the responsible production and interpretation of this diverse knowledge. Traditionally, a philosopher’s goal has been a single concept of well-being and a single theory about what it consists in. But for science this goal is both unlikely and unnecessary. Instead the promise and authority of the science depends on it focusing on the well-being of specific kinds of people in specific contexts. Sceptical arguments notwithstanding, this contextual well-being can be measured in a valid and credible way—but only if scientists broaden their methods to make room for normative considerations and address publicly and inclusively the value-based conflicts that inevitably arise when a measure of well-being is adopted. The science of well-being can be normative, empirical, and objective all at once, provided that we line up values to science and science to values.
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Queloz, Matthieu. The Practical Origins of Ideas. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198868705.001.0001.
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Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas, Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.
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Zhiming, Bao. The Systemic Nature of Substratum Transfer. Edited by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Devyani Sharma. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199777716.013.024.
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This chapter discusses four grammatical systems in Singapore English that are transferred from Chinese: aspect, pragmatic particles, topicalization, and quantification. Proper analysis of the relevant substrate features reveals extensive clustering: features which form a grammatical system transfer together. Substratum transfer targets the grammatical system, and the transferred system is then exponenced with suitable morphosyntactic materials from the lexifier, filtering out those component features for which the lexifier has no well-formed morphosyntactic exponent. The analysis of the four systems shows that post-transfer stabilization is subject to the normative effect of English. It is argued that data obtained through introspection and corpora are complementary, and substrate-induced grammatical change is best accounted for in a usage-based model that uses the two types of data.
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Wright, Jennifer Cole. The Fact and Function of Meta-Ethical Pluralism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198815259.003.0006.
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This chapter has two objectives. The first is to argue for the fact of meta-ethical pluralism. In other words, the chapter argues that the recent empirical scholarship suggesting that people are both realists and anti-realists cannot be simply dismissed on the basis of being philosophically inadequate because even when we increase the level of clarity and rigor, the pluralism remains. The second is to argue for the function of meta-ethical pluralism. In other words, the chapter argues against the view that this pluralism in people’s meta-ethical commitments is incoherent or a sign of confusion and puts forth the view that, instead, it serves a pragmatic function—namely, that it promotes civility and aids in the individual and collective navigation of normative space within a morally imperfect world.
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Bratman, Michael E. Consistency and Coherence in Plan. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190867850.003.0009.
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This essay focuses on the reflections of a planning agent on her distinctive synchronic norms of practical thinking. It develops the idea of planning agency that is self-reinforcing by way of considerations of self-governance: given that one is a planning agent whose practical thinking is guided by basic planning norms—something for which there is good reason—one’s self-governance will be such that conforming to those norms is partly constitutive of that self-governance. This helps articulate a framework within which (a) pragmatic grounds for planning agency quite generally, combine with (b) normative reasons of self-governance for conformity to basic norms in the particular case. This framework can be brought to bear by a reflective planning agent in support of basic norms of synchronic plan rationality. And this supports an interpretation of the idea that these norms are peremptory.
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Lépinard, Éléonore. Feminist Trouble. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190077150.001.0001.
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For more than two decades Islamic veils, niqabs, and burkinis have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates: defending ardently strict prohibitions to ensure Muslim women’s emancipation, or, by contrast, promoting accommodation in the name of women’s religious agency and a more inclusive feminist movement. These recent developments have unfolded in a context of rising right-wing populism in Europe and have fueled “femonationalism,” that is, the instrumentalization of women’s rights for xenophobic agendas. This book explores this contemporary troubled context for feminism, its current divisions, and its future. It investigates how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectionality politics, and the feminist collective subject, and how feminists have been enrolled in the femonationalist project or, conversely, have resisted it in two contexts: France and Quebec. It provides new empirical data on contemporary feminist activists, as well as a critical normative argument about the subject and future of feminism. It makes a contribution to intersectionality theory by reflecting on the dynamics of convergence and difference between race and religion. At the normative level, the book provides an original addition to vivid debates in feminist political theory and philosophy on the subject of feminism. It argues that feminism is better understood not as centered around an identity—women— but around what it calls a feminist ethic of responsibility, which foregrounds a pragmatist moral approach to the feminist project.
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Evans, Gareth. R2P. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy and Tim Dunne. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198753841.013.49.
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R2P was designed for pragmatists, not purists: to change state behaviour, not make new law or rewrite international relations theory. Since 2005 it has gathered momentum as a normative force, institutional catalyst, and framework for both preventive and reactive action. There are many grounds for optimism about its consolidation and further development in all these respects over the next decade and beyond: it is no longer possible for policy-makers to think and act as if mass atrocity crimes committed behind sovereign state borders are nobody else’s business. But, with dissension over the implementation of its Libyan intervention mandate in 2011 paralysing the Security Council’s subsequent response to atrocities in Syria, much remains to be done to recreate Council consensus over the hardest cases, those potentially requiring coercive military force. Some variation on the concept of ‘responsibility while protecting’, first advanced by Brazil in 2011, offers the most productive way forward.
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Lowrie, Michèle. Roman Law and Latin Literature. Edited by Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Kaius Tuori. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198728689.013.6.
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The law and literature movement is less active in Roman studies than in modern national languages despite the importance of ancient Rome for subsequent traditions. This chapter hopes to spur further research by surveying a range of representative topics individually familiar to Latinists, but whose interconnections become clearer under the “law and literature” rubric. These are: discursive media; censorship; law and theatricality; educative fictions; typology, exemplarity and moral reasoning; transformations in the public sphere. The Romans perceived law’s interaction with literature in terms that range from homology, to contestation, to intimate discomfort. Both do things with stories, both serve as normative vehicles, and fiction cannot rigorously disambiguate between these discourses. The Romans, however, were acutely aware of how formal differences affected pragmatic outcomes. A strong articulation of literature as ineffective over against the law’s power emerged during the Augustan period and was formative for modern conceptualisations.
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Smith, Holly M. The Problems of Ignorance and Uncertainty. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199560080.003.0009.
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Chapter 9 turns to further epistemic barriers for decision makers: the problems of (nonmoral) ignorance and (nonmoral) uncertainty. The concepts of “ignorance” and “uncertainty” are elucidated, the problem of uncertainty is defined, and it is argued that the problem of ignorance should be treated as a special case of the problem of uncertainty. The three salient attempts to solve the problem are the Pragmatic, Austere, and Hybrid approaches. Combined solutions to the problem of error and the problem of uncertainty are explored, and it is argued that the only feasible approaches marry the Austere Response to the problem of error with the Hybrid Response to the problem of uncertainty in a two-tier system. The top-tier code provides the correct theoretical account of right and wrong, while the lower-tier rules provide associated decision-guides. Consistency requires that different normative terms be used by the top-tier rules and by the lower-tier rules.
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Kristensen, Anders R., Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth, and Bent Meier Sørensen. Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). Edited by Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, and Robin Holt. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199669356.013.0031.
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Gilles Deleuze is a French philosopher known for his ontological thinking. In the field of organization studies, Deleuze is associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism along with fellow thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. This chapter examines Deleuze’s philosophical views and considers how processual thinking has emerged as an important area of research within organization and management studies. It first looks at Deleuze’s understanding of metaphysics and the creation of concepts, along with the connection between process organization studies and the creation of concepts. It then discusses the process ontology that exists within process organization studies in the context of process thinking. It also describes the new spirit of capitalism and its implications for contemporary management thought and highlights some individual cases in which a certain, perhaps Deleuzian, philosophy of organization is developed. The chapter concludes by arguing that the deployment of Deleuze’s philosophy in process organization studies should be more normative and pragmatic.
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Bratman, Michael E. Planning, Time, and Self-Governance. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190867850.001.0001.
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Our human capacity for planning agency plays central roles in the cross-temporal organization of our agency, in our acting and thinking together, and in our self-governance. Intentions can be understood as states in such a planning system. The practical thinking essential to this planning capacity is guided by norms that enjoin synchronic plan consistency and coherence as well as forms of plan stability over time. This book’s essays aim to deepen our understanding of these norms and defend their status as norms of practical rationality for planning agents. General guidance by these planning norms has many pragmatic benefits, especially given our cognitive and epistemic limits. But appeal to these pragmatic benefits does not fully explain the normative force of these norms in application to the particular case. In response, some think these norms are norms of theoretical rationality on belief; or are constitutive of agency; or are just a myth. These essays chart an alternative path, which sees these planning norms as tracking conditions of a planning agent’s self-governance, both at a time and over time. This path articulates associated models of self-governance; it appeals to the agent’s end of her self-governance over time; and it argues that this end is rationally self-sustaining. This end is thereby in a position to play a role in our planning framework that is analogous to the role of a concern with quality of will within the framework of the reactive attitudes, as understood by Peter Strawson.
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Fogal, Daniel, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss, eds. New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738831.001.0001.
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The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.
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Downes, William. Linguistics and the Scientific Study of Religion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190636647.003.0004.
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Registers of language are cultural templates, normatively constituting the situation types that make up a culture, and yet reciprocally determined by the situation’s linguistic requirements. This chapter proposes that a register such as prayer has typical psychological effects within the mind/brain of its users. These make it also a cognitive register, a linguistically enabled and shaped way of thinking and feeling. This process is analysed using cognitive pragmatics, more specifically relevance theory. Processing petitionary prayer can produce specific psychological effects. It is proposed that the petitions are not directive speech acts, but tools for learning. Petitionary prayer also shapes affectivity and motivation. This is explored using Panksepp’s concept of the SEEKING system. The mind-brain of one who prays is trained into habits of understanding and feeling otherwise unavailable. By bringing together these two approaches, the sociological and the psychological, the essay investigates how a cultural linguistic practice shapes religious cognition.
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Cornago, Noé. Diplomacy and Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.155.
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The relationship between diplomacy and revolution is often intertwined with the broader issue of the international dimensions of revolution. Diplomacy can offer important insights into both the historical evolution of world order and its evolving functional and normative needs. In other words, the most important dimension of diplomacy, beyond its concrete symbolic and pragmatic operational value, is its very existence as raison de système. A number of scholarly works that explore the link between revolution and the international arena have given rise to a minority subfield of scholarly research and debate which is particularly vibrant and plural. Three basic lines of research can be identified: case studies undertaken by historians and area studies scholars that focus on the international dimensions surrounding particular revolutions; comparative political studies that address the international implications of revolutions by departing from a more comprehensive theoretical framework but still based in comprehensive case studies; and more theoretically comprehensive literature which, in addition to careful case studies, aims to provide a general and far-reaching explanatory theoretical framework on the relationship between revolution and long-term historical change from different perspectives: English school international theory, neorealism, world systems analysis, postmarxism, or constructivism. In a context of growing inequality and global exploitation, the international dimension of revolutions is receiving renewed attention from scholars using innovative critical theoretical approaches.