Terence Rajivan Edward

Political philosophers sometimes write of liberal democracies, but which societies, if any, are liberal democracies? John Rawls says that in the public political culture of a liberal democracy, we find the principle that this society should be a fair system of cooperation between free and equal individuals. In this paper, I draw attention to how, if we grant Rawls’s definition, a society can easily be mistaken for a liberal democracy when it is not. I then argue that Andrew March, Gabrielle Badano and Alasia Nuti have not given sufficient evidence for treating various European societies as Rawlsian liberal democracies.

This paper responds to an argument against a kind of anthropology. According to the argument, if the aim of anthropology is to describe the different worldviews of different groups, then anthropologists should only refer to material artefacts in order to illustrate a worldview; but the interest of artefacts to anthropology goes beyond mere illustration. This argument has been endorsed by key members of the ontological movement in anthropology, who found at least one of its premises in Marilyn Strathern’s writing.

There are some premise-by-premise reconstructions in political philosophy which are flawed, because they omit at least one premise or misword at least one premise. This paper focuses on a reconstruction by Richard Child. The original argument is by Andrea Sangiovanni and is about whether egalitarian values of distributive justice apply both within a state and globally. Child’s reconstruction has been reproduced in a paper by Ian Davis, who approves of it. But I point out five logical problems with the reconstruction.

This paper discusses an explanation, offered by Tim Ingold, for why social and cultural anthropologists have so far paid little attention to the materials from which artefacts are composed. The explanation is that these anthropologists accept a certain argument. According to the argument, what an anthropologist should focus on when examining an artefact is the quality that makes it part of a culture, and this is not the materials from which the artefact is composed. I show that Ingold has not made a compelling case against this argument, but also that it is not sound.

It is tempting to interpret Marilyn Strathern as saying that the concept of nature is a social construction, because in her essay “No Nature, No Culture: the Hagen Case” she tells us that the Hagen people do not describe the world using this concept. However, I point out an obstacle to interpreting her in this way, an obstacle which leads me to reject this interpretation. Interpreting her in this way makes her inconsistent. The inconsistency is owing to a commitment that she shares with previous British anthropologists, a commitment which points to an incompatibility between two intellectual traditions.