Stephen D'Arcy

Huron University At Western
  •  285
    Gottlob Frege’s völkisch Political Theology
    Politics, Religion, and Ideology 23 (2). 2022.
    Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) has been called ‘the undisputed father of analytic philosophy’ and ‘the most important logician since Aristotle.’ Even if his impact on philosophy were to extend no further than his decisive influence on leading early twentieth-century thinkers of the stature of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap, that alone would assure him a notable place in the history of modern philosophy. Nevertheless, there are other areas of Frege’s intellectual activity that…Read more
  •  233
    The Political Vocabulary of the Post-New Left
    In A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-hegemony, Arp Books. 2016.
    Movement-building involves, crucially, an attempt to build bridges that mediate between the transformative aims of radicals and broad publics that are normally indifferent to projects of far-reaching social change. The vocabularies that activists deploy, in order to understand themselves and to make themselves understood by others, can serve to construct such bridges. But they can also serve to erect barriers to the constructive work already done, notably by previous generations. It is worth pay…Read more
  •  225
    Is there ever an obligation to commit welfare fraud?
    Journal of Value Inquiry 42 (3): 377-387. 2008.
    All things considered, there are many public assistance recipients for whom there are compelling moral reasons to engage in welfare fraud. For many people, failure to defraud the welfare system, should they find themselves in a position to do so with impunity, would constitute a serious moral offense. This conclusion seems to fly in the face of prevailing notions of common sense. But this is misleading, since it is at the same time implied by principles that are widely embraced, assuming a set o…Read more
  •  180
    My aim in this paper is fairly modest. I obviously do not claim that there has never been or could never be an instance of irrational or fallacious appeals to quotations from canonical sources in the marxist tradition. Instead, I claim that the practice of using quotations from canonical sources is not, as such, irrational. If we understand the epistemological infrastructure of the practice -- the rational underpinnings of it -- we can grasp how these citations appeal to the presumptive authorit…Read more
  •  110
    The Principle of Solidarity
    with D.'
    In C. Levine-Rasky and L. Kowalchuk (ed.), We Resist: Defending the Common Good in Hostile Times. pp. 251-256. 2020.
    The ethical basis of trade unionism is the principle of solidarity, according to which “an injury to one is an injury to all.” The principle is analyzed in accordance with three competing interpretations: a “common-interest” interpretation, a “common-fate” interpretation, and a “common front” interpretation. The last of these interpretations, according to which the principle sets out “the terms of a mutually advantageous practice of reliable and reciprocal defence of one another, as if we were e…Read more
  •  12
    In its opening chapters, ‘Languages of the Unheard’ offers a broad account of militancy as an aid to democracy and a principled response to the intransigence of elites and the unresponsiveness of institutions to the public interest. It proposes an understanding of militancy as a civic virtue and a contribution to democratic politics, relying on a normative conception of ‘autonomous democracy.’ In the second part of the book, this understanding of admirable militancy is applied to a wide range of…Read more
  • Fred Rush, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (review)
    Philosophy in Review 26 439-441. 2006.
  • Rethinking the Political Morality of Poverty
    Dissertation, University of Toronto (Canada). 2003.
    Political philosophers have generally viewed the moral issues posed by poverty as issues of distributive justice, that is, of the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social co-operation. This "distributive model" of what makes poverty morally important captures much of the moral experience of poverty in modern societies, and we could scarcely formulate many of the most prominent grievances and controversies surrounding poverty without recourse such a model. Nevertheless, the distrib…Read more