TOPOI-AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

In contemporary democracies, the balance between the minority principle and democratic principles, one of the components underlying the relationship between liberalism and democracy, is being broken. This paper offers a reflection on this theme - crucial for the future of representative government - in relation to the importance of the theory of elites. The article is divided into three parts: the first part briefly traces the main phases of the theory of elites from the late nineteenth century to the present, indicating, for each, the salient features; the second part focuses on the elements characterizing the alliance between the minority principle and democratic principles, which forms the basis of liberal representative democracy, with specific consideration paid to the geometric architecture of democracy, comprising a horizontal dimension and a vertical dimension; finally, the third part argues the need for strengthening the logic of distance to consolidate the connection between the theory of elites and liberal representative democracy.

Is there good reason to worry about celebrity involvement in democratic politics? The rise of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky has led political theorists and commentators to worry that the role of expertise in democratic politics has been undermined. According to one recent critique (Archer et al. 2020), celebrities possess a significant degree of epistemic power (the power to influence what people believe) that is unconnected to appropriate expertise. This presents a problem both for deliberative and epistemic theories of democratic legitimacy, which ignore this form of power, and for real existing democracies attempting to meet the standards of legitimacy set out by these theories. But do these critiques apply to democratic elitism? In this paper, we argue that recognition of celebrity epistemic power in fact represents a valuable resource for supporting the legitimacy and practice of democratic elitism, though these benefits do come with certain risks to which elite theories are particularly vulnerable.

In order to explore how emotions contribute positively or negatively to understanding the meaning of complex socio-culturally specific phenomena, I argue that we must take into account the habitual dimension of emotions - i.e., the emotion repertoire that a feeling person acquires in the course of their affective biography. This brings to light a certain form of alignment in relation to affective intentionality that is key to comprehending why humans understand situations in the way they do and why it so often is especially hard to understand things differently. A crucial epistemic problem is that subjects often do not even enter a process of understanding, i.e., they do not even start to consider a specific object, theory, circumstance, other being, etc. in different ways than the familiar one. The epistemic problem at issue thus lies in an unquestioned faith in things being right the way they are taken to be. By acknowledging the habitual dimension of affective intentionality, I analyze reasons for this inability and suggest that being affectively disruptable and cultivating a pluralistic emotion repertoire are crucial abilities to overcome this epistemic problem.

This paper seeks to widen the dialogue between the "epistemology of peer disagreement" and the epistemology informed by Wittgenstein's last notebooks, later edited as On Certainty. The paper defends the following theses: (i) not all certainties are groundless; many of them are beliefs; and they do not have a common essence. (ii) An epistemic peer need not share all of my certainties. (iii) Which response (steadfast, conciliationist etc.) to a disagreement over a certainty is called for, depends on the type of certainty in question. Sometimes a form of relativism is the right response. (iv) Reasonable, mutually recognized peer disagreement over a certainty is possible.-The paper thus addresses both interpretative and systematic issues. It uses Wittgenstein as a resource for thinking about peer disagreement over certainties.

When people argue, they are vulnerable to unwanted and costly changes in their beliefs. This vulnerability motivates the position that belief involuntarism makes argument inherently adversarial (Casey, Informal Log 40:77-108, 2020), as well as the development of alternatives to adversarial argumentation such as "invitational rhetoric" (Foss and Griffin, Commun Monogr 62:2-18, 1995). The emphasis on involuntary belief change in such accounts, in our perspective, neglects three dimensions of arguing: the diversity of arguer intentions, audience agency, and the benefits of belief change. The complex impact of arguments on both audiences and arguers involves vulnerabilities related to various forces of argument, not just the intellectual force of premise-conclusion complexes. Shifting emphasis from adversariality to vulnerability, we propose a more holistic understanding of argument, in which vulnerability reveals various sources of strength and opportunity in addition to risk.

Since at least the 1980s, the role of adversariality in argumentation has been extensively discussed within different domains. Prima facie, there seem to be two extreme positions on this issue: argumentation should (ideally at least) never be adversarial, as we should always aim for cooperative argumentative engagement; argumentation should be and in fact is always adversarial, given that adversariality (when suitably conceptualized) is an intrinsic property of argumentation. I here defend the view that specific instances of argumentation are (and should be) adversarial or cooperative to different degrees. What determines whether an argumentative situation should be primarily adversarial or primarily cooperative are contextual features and background conditions external to the argumentative situation itself, in particular the extent to which the parties involved have prior conflicting or else convergent interests. To further develop this claim, I consider three teloi that are frequently associated with argumentation: the epistemic telos, the consensus-building telos, and the conflict management telos. I start with a brief discussion of the concepts of adversariality, cooperation, and conflict in general. I then sketch the main lines of the debates in the recent literature on adversariality in argumentation. Next, I discuss the three teloi of argumentation listed above in turn, emphasizing the roles of adversariality and cooperation for each of them.

Standard game theory cannot explain the selection of payoff-dominant outcomes that are best for all players in common-interest games. Theories of team reasoning can explain why such mutualistic cooperation is rational. They propose that teams can be agents and that individuals in teams can adopt a distinctive mode of reasoning that enables them to do their part in achieving Pareto-dominant outcomes. We show that it can be rational to play payoff-dominant outcomes, given that an agent group identifies. We compare team reasoning to other theories that have been proposed to explain how people can achieve payoff-dominant outcomes, especially with respect to rationality. Some authors have hoped that it would be possible to develop an argument that it is rational to group identify. We identify some large-probably insuperable-problems with this project and sketch some more promising approaches, whereby the normativity of group identification rests on morality.

One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers. One controversy involves whether powers are single- or multi-track; that is, whether each power has only one manifestation type, or whether a single power can be directed towards a number of distinct manifestations. Another concerns how powers operate: whether a lone power manifests when triggered by the presence of a suitable stimulus, or whether powers operate mutually such that several powers must 'work together' to bring about a particular manifestation. This paper examines how these distinctions-which can be cross-combined to frame four distinct accounts of the nature of powers-bear on the debate between emergentists and reductionists.

A prominent objection to non-cognitive moral bio-enhancements (NCMBEs) is that they would compromise the recipient's 'freedom to fall'. I begin by discussing some ambiguities in this objection, before outlining an Aristotelian reading of it. I suggest that this reading may help to forestall Persson and Savulescu's 'God-Machine' criticism; however, I suggest that the objection still faces the problem of explaining why the value of moral conformity is insufficient to outweigh the value of the freedom to fall itself. I also question whether the objection is compatible with Neil Levy's parity principle. Accordingly, I go on to consider an alternative relational freedom-based objection to NCMBEs that aims to explain the fundamental moral importance of the freedom that NCMBEs would violate. I argue that although this strategy might allow the critic of NCMBEs to bypass a powerful criticism of Harris' objection, it also weakens the freedom-based objection's compatibility with the parity principle.