Giuseppina Ronzitti

The democratic decision-making method determines a collective decision on the basis of individual votes of all adult citizens, each vote having the same weight. Jason Brennan (2016) argues that the decisions of individual voters in state-level elections tend to be epistemically defective (avoidance of serious knowledge-acquisition, biased reasoning) and maintains that voters are rational in not doing anything about it, since reducing one's epistemic defects would not augment the chances of one's vote becoming decisive. Yet, incompetently made collective decisions can hardly provide a good means for attaining the outcomes that citizens desire. Democracy appears to fail as an instrument. We ask whether the problems that Brennan identifies occur even in small municipalities. We argue for a negative answer, making use of insights gained through interviews conducted in municipalities with 300 to 500 inhabitants situated in the Åland Islands. Here, a single vote can be decisive. When voting, the inhabitants wish to delegate municipality-political responsibility to someone they trust. They do not reason in terms of society-level outcomes; due to limited resources, the elected representatives even could not undertake any large-scale initiatives. There is very little electoral competition, but inhabitants can contribute to decision-making in many ways. There prevails a balance between democratic participation and informed decision-making. The equilibrium could easily break down: smaller population size would lead to dysfunctionality, augmenting the size might affect negatively the trust between decision-makers and inhabitants, and increased resources could lead to decisions the inhabitants could not control.

We take up Jason Brennan’s critique of democracy as formulated in his monograph _Against Democracy_ (2016) and discuss the arguments that Åsa Wikforss presents against Brennan’s views in her book _Därför demokrati_ (2021). Both authors grant the importance of knowledge for political decision-making, but they differ in their respective understandings of what counts as knowledge and they draw very different conclusions from the relevant knowledge requirement. Our general aim is to detect problems in democracy as well as in attempts to criticize democracy. We also briefly consider Brennan’s positive proposal to replace democracy by “epistocracy”, a form of government according to which only those citizens are entitled to vote who are “competent” in a sense to be discussed. Our aim is not to propagate any particular form of government. We merely wish to help the reader to recognize that democracy in particular involves a whole lot of assumptions that are in need of a better justification than what is normally provided.

Richard Tieszen's new book1 is a collection of fifteen articles and reviews, spanning fifteen years, presenting the author's approach to philosophical questions about logic and mathematics from the point of view of phenomenology, as developed by Edmund Husserl in the later phase2 of his philosophical thinking known as transcendental phenomenology, starting in 1907 with the Logical Investigations and characterized by the introduction of the notions of ‘reduction’. Husserlian transcendental phenomenology as philosophy of mathematics is described as one that ‘cuts across’ different philosophical positions, such as platonism, nominalism, fictionalism, Hilbertian formalism, etc. but, at the same time, as having built in the conceptual tools which allow one not to incur the kinds of problems which are usually related to one's preferred approach. Phenomenology centers around the notion of intentionality3 or aboutness, i.e. the characteristic of acts of cognition of being about something. The ‘something’ a cognitive act is about is called its ‘intentional object’, meaning the object of an intentional act. Any kind of object can be seen as an intentional object irrespective of whether it is concrete, illusory, abstract, etc. Indeed the emphasis is on the intentional act, as it is in the intentional act that the object—which need not be claimed to exist—is present. In order to achieve knowledge of an object the phenomenologist investigates the consciousness of the knowing subject when performing the act directed to that particular object.Characterized in this way, it is not difficult to see that phenomenology has a straightforward bearing on almost everything, philosophy of mathematics included. As Tieszen puts it , ‘[…] our mathematical beliefs are always about something. They are about certain objects, such as numbers, sets, functions or groups […]’. …