© Matt Perry Last week was a milestone for animals. Prominent scientists, philosophers and policy experts came together to sign the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a statement detailing a consensus that mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, cephalopods (like octopuses), crustaceans (like crabs) and even insects most probably have subjective experiences, known as “sentience”. This may not come as a surprise to many of us, but academic research is often characterised by disagreement. A public announcement of consensus is not only profoundly unusual, it also brings into view j ..read more

Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/gallery/ajax-feyenoord-riots-police-eredivisie-31017200 In September 2023, a match between the Dutch football teams Ajax and Feyenoord was abandoned after Ajax supporters threw flares and fireworks on the field. Following the cancellation, fans clashed with riot police and vandalized the stadium. The police had to resort to using tear gas to disperse the crowds. If certain corners of the internet are to be believed, Games Workshop – the multiple-multi-million company behind the Warhammer miniature wargames – is about to go bankrupt. This is ..read more

Humanity faces a number of daunting challenges in the 21st century. Climate change and socioeconomic injustice figure prominently on this list. When it comes to tackling these challenges, two possible strategies divide policy makers. On the one hand, there are those who point out that addressing either of these problems on their own is a mammoth task, and that taking them on simultaneously is simply utopian. This view sometimes comes with a dose of optimism about technological solutions to climate change. On the other hand, an increasing number of voices argue that climate action can’t be sepa ..read more

Horses have a purpose in life, just like us all. Unfortunately, when people go to work, sometimes bad things happen. (AP McCoy, former jockey, quoted in The Telegraph) On Saturday the 13th of April 2024, one of the world’s most famous horse races, the Grand National, is scheduled to take place. The race first took place at Aintree Racecourse in 1839, where it continues to be hosted, and this will be its 176th annual running. The race is very popular in the UK with 70,000 people in attendance last year, and ten million watching on TV. Beyond the UK, its appeal is wide-reaching with an estimat ..read more

Not only are there more democratic and egalitarian alternatives theoretically, but also policies being pursued successfully at the city and the regional level, in many places, that do give people a sense of control in the economic sphere. It’s not just wishful and abstract thinking; there is abundant proof of concept. We have to remain hopeful; we have to shine a light on those examples and talk about why they represent elements of a different kind of settlement, a more justifiable and more human political and economic system, that we ought to strive to see realized more widely and more deepl ..read more

In this post, David Benatar (U. Cape Town) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the paradox of desert, exploring the issues that arise from ‘acting rightly’ and the costs it may incur. (C) David Benatar. Camondo Stairs, Galata, Istanbul, 2022 Imagine that you are a soldier fighting a militia that is embedded within an urban civilian population. You face situations in which, in the fog of war, you are unsure whether the person you confront is a civilian or a combatant, not least because the combatants you are fighting often dress like civilians. You c ..read more

A mural dedicated to Sci-Hub at UNAM. Txtdgtl, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons This is a guest post by Georgiana Turculet (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). In his recently published “More Open Access, More Inequality in the Academia”, Alex Volacu aptly criticizes present Open Access (OA) policies for giving rise to structural inequalities among researchers, and increasing revenues only for publishers. His analysis is aimed at contextualizing some recent academic events, that is, the board of the well-known Journal of Political Philosophy resigning d ..read more

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, an interview between Dana Mills and Zsuzsanna Chappell about Mills’s activist work in Israel-Palestine. Dana Mills is a writer, dancer, and peace and human rights advocate. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2014. As an academic, she has held posts, among other institutions, at the University of Oxford, NYU, Northwestern University, American Dance Festival, Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, University of Amsterdam and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Since 2021 she has been working i ..read more

What do these four countries have in common? From top left, clockwise, we have the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. All of these countries have “democratic” in the name. None of them are (or were) democratic. Words like “democracy”, “freedom”, “equality”, “power” and “oppression” have magical political powers and so activists strive to define these words in ways that further their goals. This is a fact of politics. Sometimes political theorists get in on this act ..read more

In this post Marc Sanjaume-Calvet (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), discusses the role of federalism as a way of protecting from the tyranny of the majority, safeguarding both against the ills of centralised power and territorial self-government. The reflections in this post stems from his recently published book, coedited with Professor Ferran Requejo (UPF), Defensive Federalism Protecting Territorial Minorities from the “Tyranny of the Majority” (2023, Routledge). Image by George Becker from Pexels Defensive federalism to the rescue In the era of democratic backsliding and globalization the federa ..read more