Philosophy

Although Kant argues that a world republic with coercive public law is the only rational way to secure a lawful cosmopolitan condition, he states that it is an unachievable ideal, and he proposes a voluntary, non-coercive federation of states as a substitute. While some scholars have criticized Kant for moving away from this ideal due merely to pragmatic considerations, I argue that his rejection of a coercive world republic is based on his conception of state sovereignty and what is required for a lawful condition. I consider how we can institutionalize a lawful condition between states without a coercive world republic in ways that go beyond Kant’s voluntary federation.

By considering how the right to adequate food has been interpreted and applied in international law, I argue that there are important pragmatic reasons to appeal to the right to adequate food in promoting and ensuring food security.  I respond to practical and conceptual objections against recognizing the right to adequate food as a human right.  First, I consider the objection that the right to adequate food, like other socio-economic rights, is not a real human right because it cannot be enforced by courts in the same way as civil-political rights (the justiciability objection).  In addition to considering how the right to adequate food and other socio-economic rights have been legally enforced by courts or monitoring bodies in international law and in other domestic legal systems, I also consider how some socio-economic rights have been protected in state constitutions within the United States and how courts have enforced these, an area that is often neglected in discussions of socio-economic rights in the United States.  I also respond to a more conceptual objection that the right to adequate food and other rights to goods and services are not real rights or real normative claims since it is not clear who has a duty to fulfill these rights (the claimability objection).  Onora O’Neill provides the strongest defense of this objection.  While I agree that these rights will remain empty manifesto rights until corresponding duties are specified and allocated, I argue that duties need to be defined automatically from the idea of the right itself or pre-institutionally, as O'Neill suggests.  In my response, I consider different dimensions of the right to adequate food and recent issues in the United States that can be addressed by this right, such as food deserts.

A revised version of the attached paper has been published here: http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_jurisprudence/vol8/iss1/2/

International legal scholars and lawyers have primarily tried to refute the objection that international law is not really law because it lacks a supranational system of coercive sanctions by demonstrating that international law is in fact coercively enforced albeit it in decentralized ways.  I will focus instead on the presumption behind this skeptical view – the idea that law must be coercively enforced.  First, I argue that coercive enforcement is not conceptually necessary for law or legal obligations.  Second, I consider the claim that coercive enforcement is nonetheless necessary for instrumental reasons.  I argue that while physical coercion is instrumentally useful for increasing compliance in the domestic case, this is less effective and more problematic in the international case.  In considering what then is essential and distinctive about law and what would increase the effectiveness of international law, I propose that, first, international law needs to be generally accepted as binding by states, officials, and other agents, and second, that international legal rules should be determinatively interpreted and applied by authoritative adjudicative and administrative institutions.

After examining the various harms experienced by victims of online abuse, and the limitations of different legal responses in the U.S. and in other countries, I consider how philosophical debates about free speech apply to these cases of online abuse against women. There are very good reasons to protect free speech as much as possible, even offensive and vulgar speech. Not only is this necessary to ensure a free and democratic society, it also an important aspect of one’s exercise of autonomy. The Internet has opened up a shared space for public discourse. It is important to recognize, however, that the very values and goals that are promoted by protecting free speech can be undermined by online harassment. Online abuse has a silencing effect not only on the particular women targeted, but on other women as well. It limits the free exchange of ideas, democratic dialogue, self-expression, and autonomy. Given this, the very values and goals that justify the protection of free speech can also be used to delineate the limits of free speech. While it is valuable to strengthen laws and policies against online harassment, it is even more vital to create social norms against online harassment through public campaigns and by encouraging social media companies and others to adopt anti-harassment policies, in the same way that the sexual harassment in the workplace movement educated employers and urged them to develop workplace policies.

Critics of international law argue that it is not really law because it lacks a supranational system of coercive sanctions. International legal scholars and lawyers primarily refute this by demonstrating that international law is in fact enforced, albeit in decentralized and less coercive ways. I will focus instead on the presumption behind this skeptical view—the idea that law must be coercively enforced. First, I argue that coercive enforcement is not conceptually necessary for law or legal obligations. Second, I consider the claim that coercive enforcement is nonetheless necessary for instrumental reasons. I argue that while physical coercion is instrumentally useful for increasing compliance in the domestic case, this is less effective and more problematic in the international case. What then is essential and distinctive about law, and what would increase the effectiveness of international law? First, international law needs to be generally accepted as binding by states, officia...

The question of whether Aristotle's short treatise on the so-called categories is about words or concepts or things-or in other words, whether the Categories belongs to logic (or even grammar) rather than to metaphysics-is a notorious one in the history of philosophy. Later medieval authors inherit the relevant debate from the ancient commentators on Aristotle's Categories, but their answers often differ from that of their predecessors in at least two fundamental respects: (1) Later medieval philosophers (from the 13th century onwards) are typically more inclined towards a realist understanding of the categories; for the most part they accept the idea of ten kinds of being. And although not all of them have a realist understanding of the subject-matter of the Categories itself, they regard the treatise as a work in which Aristotle addresses these ten kinds of being from a logical point of view. 1 (2) Later medieval authors tend to broaden the problem of the scientifi c status of the Categories insofar as they not only discuss whether the Categories belongs to this or that area of knowledge, but whether the doctrine described in this work can count as knowledge at all. 2

This short chapter explores Aquinas's teaching on the vegetative soul. At first glance, Aquinas does not seem too interested in the vegetative soul, and this type of soul certainly takes last rank compared with the sensory and the intellectual souls, which are of more relevance when it comes to human perfection and morality. However, this does not mean that Aquinas's teaching on the vegetative soul lacks sophistication. The chapter first examines why there is a need to posit a vegetative soul in the first place. It then turns to the three main functions of the vegetative soul-nutrition, growth, and generation-and how they are related. After addressing in what sense, according to Aquinas, human beings possess a vegetative soul, the chapter closes with a reflection on the relative obscurity of the activities of the vegetative soul. 1 See also Amalia Cerrito's contribution to this volume.

The debate over the nature of human agency that erupted at the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th centuries is one of the most studied topics in medieval philosophy. But despite an exuberant secondary literature, the scope of the disagreement between intellectualists and voluntarists remains unclear. Do the opposing parties merely disagree over the psychological foundation of human free agency? Or do they disagree more fundamentally about what it means to be free? This short paper examines what Henry of Ghent, one of the champions of the voluntarist cause, thought about the nature of freedom (ratio libertatis). By examining Question Five in Henry’s Quodlibet XIV, the paper hopes to set the stage for a deeper understanding of the notion(s) of freedom underlying late medieval debates over human free agency.

The world’s largest Leach’s Storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) colonies are in Newfoundland, Canada, with Baccalieu Island alone supporting over 3 million nesting pairs. Since 2001, an effort was made to re-census many of the larger colonies in Newfoundland and compare current population estimates with those from the 1970s and early 1980s. Surveys were undertaken by grubbing small plots, calculating occupied burrow densities and extrapolating these densities to the area occupied by petrels. Playback and burrow entrance monitoring proved to be less or equally effective as grubbing, but required much more time, possibly due to the high densities of occupied burrows. The larger colonies examined appeared to be stable between the 1970-80s and the early 2000s while the two smaller colonies examined, Middle Lawn Island and Small Island, showed declines. The establishment of large gull [both Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) and Herring Gull (L. argentatus)] colonies close to these...

The navigation function methodology, established in previous work for centralized multiple robot navigation, is extended for decentralized navigation with input constraints. In contrast to the centralized case, each agent plans its actions without knowing the destinations of the other agents. Asymptotic stability is guaranteed by the existence of a global Lyapunov function for the whole system, which is actually the sum of the separate navigation functions. The collision avoidance and global convergence properties as well as input requirements are verified through simulations.

sence of a separate operculum in extant gymnophionans may be hypothesized to relate to the loss of the shoulder girdle and the muscular link between the girdle and operculum. Nonetheless, a substantial morphological and temporal gap still intervenes in the identification of caecilian origins. Lissamphibia still remains at best a crown group concept, without a securely rooted stem in the Paleozoic.

The modern synthesis theory of evolution is predicated upon a conception of the relationship between inheritance and development that can be called the 'two spaces and a barrier' view. The view preserves a privileged role for genes: they are discrete units of inheritance, and the principal causes of phenotypes. It also explicitly excludes development, behaviour, learning, and social interactions from the production of genuine evolutionary novelties. It is argued here that the two spaces and a barrier view has been generated, to a significant degree, by a specific mode of causal inference: the 'method of difference'. The method of difference is, however, inapplicable, and indeed misleading, given what we now know about the function of genes in development and inheritance. This realization should cause us to rethink the role of genes, genomes, and organisms in evolution. In particular, it should lead us to consider that the processes occurring within the lifetime of organisms, including development, behaviour and learning, make direct contributions to evolution, unmediated by genes.

Barely a decade after the discovery of the chromosomal basis of inheritance, and the articulation of the genetical theory of population change, the gene came to be widely regarded as the fundamental unit of biological organization. This is hardly surprising. The gene concept is a powerful one; it plays a unifying role in our understanding of evolution. Darwin told us that evolution by natural selection occurs in a population when organisms survive, die and reproduce differentially on account of their heritable form (what we now call 'phenotype'). This is a very schematic theory. It requires an account of the process of inheritance and also an account of the generation of phenotype. The gene concept plays a prominent role in explaining, and uniting, these phenomena. Genes are the units of inheritance; they are passed from parents to offspring in reproduction. Moreover, they are seen as units of phenotypic control. Evolutionary biologists often speak of the genome as a program for the production of an organism. Genes also became the elements of which populations are composed. Our best theory of population dynamics-inherited from Fisher, Haldane, and Wright-is a theory of changes in the relative frequencies of gene types. Genes are not just the principal causes of evolutionary change, they are also the units over which evolutionary change is defined and measured. So, at least, the orthodox reading of the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution would have us believe. The successes of this gene-centred evolutionary biology hardly need recounting. But one may celebrate its successes without succumbing to its excesses. Since the 1980s an alternative movement in evolutionary biologyevolutionary developmental biology ('evo-devo') and ecological-evolutionarydevelopmental biology ('eco-evo-devo') 1-has been gaining prominence. Evodevo seeks to rein in the rhetoric of gene-centred biology, and to offer a more realistically organism-centred perspective on the process of evolution (Callebaut, Muller and Newman 2007). Marion Blute's revised definition of evolution by natural selection is a contribution to this conceptual reconfiguration of evolutionary biology, and a welcome one. Professor Blute proposes that we think of evolution by natural selection in the following way: