•  98
    Parmenides and Sartre
    Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 17 (n/a): 161-184. 1968.
    As the first ontologist, Parmenides has a special place in the history of philosophy, not only because of his originality, but also because of the greatness of his particular attempt in the philosophy of being. His stature is such that any later attempt in the inquiry into being must measure itself against his achievement. His famous philosophical poem, which we have in fragments, is a permanent challenge to later philosophers. Thus Plato could describe Parmenides as ‘a man to be respected and a…Read more
  •  569
    Political realism meets civic republicanism
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 331-347. 2017.
    The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper arg…Read more
  •  6
    Slote on Consequentialism (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 36 (44): 399. 1986.
  •  30
    On People’s Terms. A Reply to Four Critiques
    Philosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 5 (2). 2015.
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  •  58
    Trust, Reliance and the Internet
    Analyse & Kritik 26 (1): 108-121. 2004.
    Trusting someone in an intuitive, rich sense of the term involves not just relying on that person, but manifesting reliance on them in the expectation that this manifestation of reliance will increase their reason and motive to prove reliable. Can trust between people be formed on the basis of Internet contact alone? Forming the required expectation in regard to another person, and so trusting them on some matter, may be due to believing that they are trustworthy; to believing that they seek est…Read more
  •  660
    Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma
    Philosophical Issues 11 (1): 268-299. 2001.
    Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually vote, in the light of that debate, on whether or not to support the conclusion? Or does it recommend t…Read more
  • Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice
    with John Braithwaite
    Law and Philosophy 10 (2): 221-234. 1991.
  •  627
    Group agents have been represented as expressive fictions by those who treat ascriptions of agency to groups as metaphorical; as pragmatic fictions by those who think that the agency ascribed to groups belongs in the first place to a distinct individual or set of individuals; and as theoretical fictions by those who think that postulating group agents serves no indispensable role in our theory of the social world. This paper identifies, criticizes and rejects each of these views, defending a str…Read more
  •  25
    Response to Commentaries on Made with Words
    Hobbes Studies 22 (2): 208-218. 2009.
    This reply argues five points, in response to the commentaries on my book, “Made with Words”. First, that Hobbes's theory of language may have supported his materialism, as his materialism supported the theory of language. Second, that for Hobbes legal penalties as such do not take from freedom, only legal obligations. Third, that his emphasis on maker's knowledge explains his theory of a priori demonstrable knowledge and, in particular, the importance he gives to definitions. Fourth, that Hobbe…Read more
  •  197
    A republican right to basic income?
    Basic Income Studies 2 (2). 2007.
    The basic income proposal provides everyone in a society, as an unconditional right, with access to a certain level of income. Introducing such a right is bound to raise questions of institutional feasibility. Would it lead too many people to opt out of the workforce, for example? And even if it did not, could a constitution that allowed some members of the society to do this – at whatever relative cost – prove acceptable in a society of mutually reciprocal, equally positioned members? I assume …Read more
  •  30
    5 Neuroscience and Agent-Control
    In Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid & G. Lynn Stephens (eds.), Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, Mit Press. pp. 77. 2007.
  •  422
    Republican Theory and Criminal Punishment
    Utilitas 9 (1): 59. 1997.
    Suppose we embrace the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination: freedom as immunity to arbitrary interference. In that case those acts that call uncontroversially for criminalization will usually be objectionable on three grounds: the offender assumes a dominating position in relation to the victim, the offender reduces the range or ease of undominated choice on the part of the victim, and the offender raises a spectre of domination for others like the victim. And in that case, so it appea…Read more
  •  2
    Freedom in the spirit of sen
    In Christopher W. Morris (ed.), Amartya Sen, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
  •  88
    Rawls’s political ontology
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 4 (2): 157-174. 2005.
    The background thesis is that an implicit ontology of the people and the relation between the people and the state often shapes how we think in normative terms about politics. This article attempts to defend that thesis in relation to Rawls. The argument is that the rejection of an image of the people as a group agent connects with his objection to utilitarianism and the rejection of an image of the people as a mere aggregate connects with his objection to libertarianism. Rawls, it is argued, ho…Read more
  •  44
    Contractualism and Consequentialism
    with T. M. Scanlon
    Theoria 66 (3): 228-236. 2000.
  •  160
    There are three major issues which crop up in the discussion of metaphor among philosophers of language. They are: whether metaphor is cognitive, whether it is descriptive, and whether it is innovative. Those who deny that metaphor is cognitive are a group more often imagined than encountered, but if they existed they would consign the study of metaphor to affective stylistics, stressing the ornamentative and related effects which the phenomenon is likely to have.‘ Those who admit that metaphor …Read more
  •  42
    Collective persons and powers
    Legal Theory 8 (4): 443-470. 2002.
  •  6
    Why and how philosophy matters
    In Robert E. Goodin & Charles Tilly (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, Oxford University Press. pp. 35. 2006.
  •  1199
    Freedom as antipower
    Ethics 106 (3): 576-604. 1996.
  •  25
  •  126
    Three conceptions of democratic control
    Constellations 15 (1): 46-55. 2008.
    The idea of control or power is central to the notion of democracy, since the ideal is one of giving kratos to the demos: giving maximal or at least significant control over government to the people. But it turns out that the notion of kratos or control is definable in various ways and that as the notion is differently understood, so the ideal of democracy is differently interpreted. In this little reflection, I distinguish between three different notions of popular control, arguing that only on…Read more