by Theodore Scaltsas We are all accustomed to thinking of wellbeing in Aristotelian terms, assuming the agent’s choice (proairesis) for the preferences and actions that constitute their wellbeing. The agent chooses what is good for them and performs the relevant actions. Accordingly, autonomy is built into our conception of wellbeing. However, AI Governance cannot promise wellbeing. AI, itself, will make holistic choices within society of what is good for every agent, decide for the agent, and then the agent can pursue AI’s decisions. If AI is well designed for humans, managing humans in socie ..read more

by Jason Read One of Marx’s most lasting contributions to critical thinking about capitalism and society is the concept of the alienation of work and life under capitalism. Despite being associated with his critique of capitalism, it was principally developed in his notebooks as he was first developing his criticism of political economy. These notebooks were posthumously published as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This fragmentary and provisional development has resulted in so much of the criticism of the concept of alienation. What does it mean to be alienated? What is on ..read more

Tell us a bit about your book Choose Your Bearing is about decolonising human rights in constructive and imaginative ways. It tries to shift how we understand human-rights practice. If you ask someone what it means to defend human rights, they might think of an international courtroom or a refugee camp. I want to talk about how all of us – in addition to lawyers and aid workers – can defend human rights in our everyday lives. In this way, my approach to human rights is in dialogue with, but not limited to, international law and domestic policy. My approach results from the strange path I took ..read more

Tell us a bit about your book Choose Your Bearing is about decolonising human rights in constructive and imaginative ways. It tries to shift how we understand human-rights practice. If you ask someone what it means to defend human rights, they might think of an international courtroom or a refugee camp. I want to talk about how all of us – in addition to lawyers and aid workers – can defend human rights in our everyday lives. In this way, my approach to human rights is in dialogue with, but not limited to, international law and domestic policy. My approach results from the strange path I took ..read more

By Igor R. Reyner It is evident that we are living in a particularly challenging time, where transformative and empathic ways of listening, as well as of understanding, are much needed. Surrounded by fake news and intransigent behaviour, isolated in our houses where we barely survive, with neither the time nor the energy to listen carefully to our desires and environment, we witness politicians and world leaders turning a deaf ear to pressing issues. This seem to grant the whole society the right to do the same. In this context, the ethics and the politics of listening to and being heard shoul ..read more

by Robert Schuett I often get asked: ‘What would Hans Kelsen say about the state of democracy and world politics today?’ ‘How do we make sense of Carl Schmitt’s comeback in the twenty-first century?’ And ‘considering President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, how do we get out of this alive?’ People tend to be surprised when I reply: ‘Kelsen is dead, his ashes scattered in the Pacific off the coast of California half a century ago. Different times. We cannot know what he would say. And what for? What matters is what we, today’s Kelsenians, do say about all the stuff that’s going on.’ On the oc ..read more

by Simon P. Kennedy Back in 1532, the French Protestant reformer, John Calvin, wrote a major commentary on Seneca’s De clementia. Buried in this work is an important statement: “Man is a social animal.” Calvin believed that humans were naturally social. I argue in Reforming the Law of Nature that he also believed they were naturally political. This seems like an inconsequential fact. However, it forms the basis of my reassessment of the role of the Reformed tradition in the secularisation of political thought. Calvin was just one exemplary figure in early Reformed Protestantism who held a beli ..read more

By Paul Patton, editor of Journal of Social and Political Philosophy Journal of Social and Political Philosophy (JSPP) is an exciting new venture in collaboration with the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University, one of the leading universities in China. While there are other English language journals published in China or in association with Chinese universities, JSPP is the first such journal in the field of social and political philosophy. The Editorial and Advisory Boards include a number of scholars of Chinese political thought and comparative social and political thought. However, our a ..read more

Graham Harman and Hilan Bensusan Read it as a PDFDownload Graham Harman: Your new book Indexicalism has already created a lot of excitement, including a wonderful online book launch conference, the likes of which I have never seen before[i]. Could you start by explaining to a newcomer what “indexicalism” means? Hilan Bensusan: Indexicalism is the idea that the world is ultimately best described in terms of indexical expressions like ‘here’, ‘you’, ‘now’, ‘outside’, ‘same’ or ‘other’. Substantive descriptions like ‘water’, ‘trees’, ‘the planet Venus’, ‘the year 2021’ or ‘the German population ..read more

Graham Harman and Hilan Bensusan Have you read Part 1 – 4? Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Or read the conversation in full here!Download Graham Harman: In your book, you speak of Leibniz as a “relational” philosopher in much the same sense of Whitehead. A monad is determined by its relations to other monads. While this can certainly be found in Leibniz, is it right to omit the fact that these relations only occur indirectly, thanks to God’s pre-established harmony? In other words, although Leibniz holds that my monad has eternally included the fact of asking you these interview question ..read more