Libertarian easements revisited

In the present paper, I develop further my original argument for extending the Blockian Proviso to landlocked property. I use Walter Block’s newest rejoinder as an opportunity to generalize my case for necessity easements. I argue that in order to attenuate various conflicts of rights, libertarianism should interpret its thesis that property rights are absolute in a less demanding way.

Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction

In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.

The general-relativistic case for super-substantivalism

Super-substantivalism (of the type we’ll consider) roughly comprises two core tenets: (1) the physical properties which we attribute to matter (e.g. charge or mass) can be attributed to spacetime directly, with no need for matter as an extraneous carrier “on top of” spacetime; (2) spacetime is more fundamental than (ontologically prior to) matter. In the present paper, we revisit a recent argument in favour of super-substantivalism, based on General Relativity. A critique is offered that highlights the difference between (various accounts of) fundamentality and (various forms of) ontological dependence. This affords a metaphysically more perspicuous view of what super-substantivalism’s tenets actually assert, and how it may be defended. We tentatively propose a re-formulation of the original argument that not only seems to apply to all classical physics, but also chimes with a standard interpretation of spacetime theories in the philosophy of physics.

The Study of Religion and the Canadian Social Order

In his book From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada, Aaron Hughes provides a unique analysis of how the study of religion developed throughout the history of Canada by examining the evolution of its institutional context, that is, from faith-based seminaries and theological colleges to secular departments of religious studies. He situates these institutional changes in the development of the Canadian social order. In this uniquely Canadian context, the study of religion moved, Hughes notes, “from religious exclusion to secularism, from Christocentrism to multiculturalism, and from theology to secular religious studies.” While this is an important and original argument, Hughes offers only a cursory analysis of the unique developments in francophone Quebec universities (as he readily admits) and ignores the study of religion in other disciplines. Moreover, while Hughes traces the motivation for the transformation of the study of religion in the 1960s to the new ethno-religious diversity of Canada, I argue that it should be traced to a growing liberal cosmopolitanism that had infiltrated Canadian society, including its churches, seminaries, and theological colleges. Hughes does not adequately explore the religious roots of why Canadian Christians decided to secularize the study of religion. Finally, while Hughes examines patriarchy and colonialism in his analysis of the study of religion in earlier periods, he drops these topics in his discussion of the secularization of the study of religion, which did not address either of these issues sufficiently.

Increased Activation in the Fusiform Face Area to Greebles is a Result of Expertise Training, Not by its Face-likeness

In 2011, Brants, Wagemans, & Op de Beeck (JOCN 23:12, pp. 3949-3958) trained eight individuals to become Greeble experts, and found neuronal inversion effects [NIEs; i.e., higher Fusiform Face Area (FFA) activity for upright, rather than inverted Greebles]. These effects were also found for faces, both before and after training. By claiming to have replicated the seminal Greeble training study (i.e., Gauthier, Tarr, Anderson, Skudlarski, & Gore, 1999, Nat Neurosci, 2, 568-573), Brants et al. interpreted these results as participants viewing Greebles as faces throughout training, contrary to the original argument of subjects becoming Greeble experts only after training. However, such a claim presents two issues. First, the behavioral training results of Brants et al. did not replicate those of Gauthier et al (1999), raising concerns of whether the right training regime had been adopted. Second, both a literature review and meta-analysis of NIE in the FFA suggest its unreliability as an index of face(-like) processing. To empirically evaluate these issues, the present study compared two documented training paradigms (i.e., Gauthier & Tarr, 1997, Vision Res, 37, 1673-1682; and Gauthier, Williams, Tarr, & Tanaka, 1998, Vision Res, 38, 2401-2428) and explored their impact on the FFA. The results showed significant increases in the FFA for Greebles, and a clear neural "adaptation" (i.e., decreased activity for faces following Greebles, but not following non-face objects, in the FFA) both only in the Gauthier97 group, and only after training, reflecting clear modulation of expertise following "appropriate" training. In both groups, no clear NIE for faces nor Greebles were found. Collectively, these data invalidate the two assumptions behind the Brants et al. findings, and provide not only the updated support, but also the new evidence, for the perceptual expertise hypothesis of FFA.

Book Review: Michael Giudice, Social Construction of Law: Potential and Limits

That law is socially constructed is so ubiquitous a statement in law and the humanities as to render itself dangerously close to ‘common sense’. The subheading ‘Potential and Limits’ is the key to Giudice’s original argument in which he suggests that law is both socially constructed; yet retains a ‘natural’ core. When teaching critical theory, I encourage students to examine anything they understand as ‘common sense’ as a potential blind spot for bias and assumptions deeply ingrained in ideology. As such, the attempt to examine exactly such a potential blind spot is exactly the sort of problem legal philosophy should seek to address.

Is the privatization of state functions always, and only intrinsically, wrong? On Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State

The legitimacy of putting public activities – such as providing education and welfare, but also running prisons or providing military services – into the hands of private companies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omnilateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an important dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem normatively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli’s brilliant discussion invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better understand what an ideal civil service would look like.

Global trends in forced migration: Policy, practice and research imperatives for social work

Global forced migration rates are the highest since World War II. This article presents an overview of migration and presents an original argument as to the imperatives for social work. First, global trends are presented and forced migration is conceptualised as an international phenomenon. Second, global responses are explored with a focus on legal and protection frameworks. Finally, existing policy, practice and research gaps related to human mobility and forced displacement are examined, and recommendations for social work policy, research and practice are presented. The contextual influence of the Covid-19 pandemic is considered in this article.

In defence of newborns: a response to Kingma

Recently, I argued that subjects inside of artificial wombs—termed ‘gestatelings’ by Romanis—share the same legal and moral status as newborns (neonates). Gestatelings, on my view, are persons in both a legal and moral sense. Kingma challenges these claims. Specifically, Kingma argues that my previous argument is invalid, as it equivocates on the term ‘newborn’. Kingma concludes that questions about the legal and moral status of gestatelings remain ‘unanswered’. I am grateful to Kingma for raising potential concerns with the view I have presented. In this essay, however, I argue that (most) of Kingma’s objections are unpersuasive. First, my original argument does not equivocate on terms like ‘newborn’ or ‘neonate’. The terms denote human beings that have been born recently; that is what matters to the argument. Charges of equivocation, I suspect, rest on a confusion between the denotation and connotations of ‘newborn’ (or ‘neonate’). Next, I show that, contra Kingma, it is clear that—under current law in the USA and UK—gestatelings would count as legal persons. Moral personhood is more difficult. On that subject, Kingma’s criticisms have merit. In response, however, I show that my original claim—that gestatelings should count as moral persons—remains true on several (common) philosophical accounts of personhood. Regarding those accounts that imply gestatelings are not moral persons, I argue that advocates face a troubling dilemma. I conclude that regardless of which view of moral personhood one adopts, questions about the moral status of gestatelings are not ‘unanswered’.

Bayesian Reasoning’s Power to Challenge Religion and Empirically Justify Atheism

Bayes’ Theorem is a simple mathematical equation that can model every empirical argument. Accordingly, once understood it can be used to analyze, criticize, or improve any argument in matters of fact. By extension, it can substantially improve an overall argument for atheism (here meaning the belief that supernatural gods probably do not exist) by revealing that god apologetics generally operates through the omission of evidence, and how every argument for there being a god becomes an argument against there being a god once you reintroduce all the pertinent evidence that the original argument left out. This revelation further reveals that god apologetics generally operates through the omission of evidence. This paper demonstrates these propositions by illustrating their application with examples.