An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical
Inquiry
CALLS FOR PAPERS
January 2009: Europa!
Deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2008
April 2009:
Philosophy
and Engineering
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2008
July 2009:
Forgiveness
Deadline for submissions: July 31,
2008
July 2011: Cosmopolitanism; For and Against
Deadline for
submissions: July 31, 2010
92:1 January 2009
Europa!
Deadline for submissions: October 31,
2007
Advisory Editor: Maurizio Ferraris and Luca Morena
(University of
Turin) <maurizio.ferraris@labont.it, luca.morena@gmail.com>
The topics of national identity, national character and even
national consciousness have once more become the focus of philosophical
discussion. But what are national characters or national identities? And does
it make sense to want to foster or preserve them? Are such questions even meaningful?
As against the new (‘American’) ideals of globalization and of
multiculturalism, the idea that preservation of national cultures is a good
thing was until recently associated primarily with the countries of Europe. Arguments both for and against the fostering of
national identities have thus acquired a new poignancy with the (unsteady)
onward march of European unification, and our goal here is to readdress these
arguments in light of new European developments. What does ‘European’ mean? Is
philosophy itself, as represented by almost all of the papers published in a
journal like The Monist, something European? Is this so because philosophy was
born in Turkey?
Could there be a European identity? Could it make sense to advocate a transfer
of national allegiances on the part of the people of Europe
to a new European supranational entity? Contributers
are invited to address these and related questions from a philosophical
perspective.
92:2 April 2009
Philosophy and Engineering
Deadline for submissions: April 30,
2008
Advisory Editors: Peter Simons
(University of Leeds) <p.m.simons@leeds.ac.uk>
and Sir Duncan Michael (Arup Group)
The discipline of engineering provides an interesting family of
problems for philosophical investigation, and ideas deriving from the ontology
of action, process, and structure are increasingly being applied to engineering
specifications of complex artefacts, their production
and their functions. This issue addresses itself to philosophically interested
engineers as well as to philosophers and the general reader, and aims to
further the growing fruitful interaction between the two disciplines. Topics to
be explored may include the following: How does engineering differ from
science? How does design relate to function? What is acceptable risk and how
should it impinge on engineering decisions? Who bears responsibility for
engineering failures and disasters in complex projects? What special skills are
required by engineers and how are they imparted? What is the nature of
technical artefacts? Does engineering require or
underwrite a particular ontology? Can philosophy help in the design, creation
and deployment of engineering products, for example by providing the
ontological framework for computer representations of complex artefacts?
92:3 July 2009
Forgiveness
Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2008
Advisory Editor: Leo Zaibert
(University of Wisconsin, Parkside) <zaibert@uwp.edu>
Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Taken literally, this famous passage is
puzzling. For on the one hand if they really did not know what they were doing,
and assuming that this ignorance was not culpable, then surely they should be
excused, and not forgiven. Forgiveness, as a matter of sheer logic, presupposes
culpable wrongdoing. On the other hand, if they did know that they were doing
wrong, then presumably they should have been punished and, again, not forgiven.
To understand forgiveness, it seems, we need to know how exactly it differs
from a series of other phenomena such as punishing and blaming, on the one
hand, and pardoning and condoning on the other. This issue of The Monist
welcomes contributions addressing these and related questions, including: What,
if anything, justifies forgiveness? How does forgiveness relate to mercy,
leniency, and mere forgetting? Can, or should, forgiveness be granted
unconditionally, or does it necessitate repentance on the part of the wrongdoer?
And what, for that matter, is repentance? Can forgiveness be granted by anyone
or only by those directly wronged? And how is purely mental forgiveness related
to that sort of forgiveness that is communicated to the wrongdoer, or to
someone else, in words?
92:4 October 2009
The Meaning of Life
Deadline for submissions: October 31, 2008
Advisory Editor: Quentin Smith (Western Michigan
University) <quentin.smith@wmich.edu>
The vagueness and ambiguity of the
question ‘Is there a meaning of human life?’ is standardly
resolved by reformulations using more precise categories from the philosophy of
religion or from moral realism. But are there alternatives to such
reformulations? Consider:
(1) Biology: the meaning of human life is to survive and
reproduce; because we no longer have to struggle to survive and reproduce, we
are no longer in a position to experience this meaning.
(2) Physics: Hawking has argued that the meaning is in
principle expressible in terms of a ‘complete unified theory’, which will throw
light inter alia on‘the question of why it
is that we and the universe exist.’
(3) Psychology: People talk of sensing ‘emptiness’ in depression and ‘fullness’
in joy. Can these metaphors be justified as referring to modes of epistemic
access to some mind-independent meaning of human life that is neither religious
nor ethical in nature?
(4) Art: Some hold that there are artistic symbols which
somehow express the meaning of human life but in a way that is not expressible
in linguistic form. Can such a linguistic ineffability theory be
philosophically defended?
Are there other approaches to defending a theory of the meaning
of human life? Is it possible to articulate a formal structure or account of
meaning which all such theories must share? Articles are invited addressing
these and related questions in an analytical spirit.
93:1
January 2010
Race
Deadline for submissions: January
31, 2009
Advisory Editors:
Robin Andreasen (University of
Delaware) <
robina@udel.edu> and Ron Mallon <rmallon@philosophy.utah.edu>
This issue of The Monist will explore race – both the concept and the category – from a philosophical point of view. The focus will be
not only on the metaphysical and epistemological issues related to racial
classification, but also on the social and psychological aspects of race. What
is race? What sort of category is it, ontologically speaking? Is it an empty
category? If not, is it a biological kind, a social kind, or perhaps both? How
is race conceptualized both scientifically and in everyday discourse? What is
the proper relationship between scientific and everyday conceptions of race?
What are the biological, social, historical, and political origins of racial
thinking? What aspects of human cognition, if any, shape racial thinking? Can a
better understanding of race help our efforts to challenge racism and racial
injustice? How would race be conceptualized in a just (non-racist) society?
Would an ideal society conserve or eliminate racial classification schemes? Of
particular interest will be papers that aim to integrate treatments of these
questions in the wider discourse of science and philosophy.
93:2
April 2010
Intellectual Property
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2009
Advisory Editor: Richard Davies (University of Bergamo) <davies@unibg.it>
Your university library’s copy of The Monist is the
property of the library. If you take it home without permission, you have
stolen it. Even if you merely photocopy an article from this copy, you may have
breached the intellectual property rights of publisher and author. While the
library owns one copy of the journal, the journal seems to ‘own’ the content.
Something similar holds, too, of other reproducible products of human ingenuity
such as digital images, music, movies, and software. This issue of The
Monist is devoted to questions such as: What are the objects and
property-relations involved in such cases? What ontological categories
(particular vs. universal; concrete vs abstract;
tokens vs types) are in play here, and what are their
identity conditions? How do such entities begin to exist or go out of
existence? What is ‘managed’ by digital rights management, and what is
‘identified’ by digital object identifiers? When does quoting, sampling or
reverse engineering becomes piracy? How is copying related to faking, forging
and counterfeiting, and what roles do notions such as ‘resemblance’ and
‘intention to mislead’ have in these cases? How does the value and meaning
(economic, aesthetic or even religious) we attribute to an artefact
(be it a banknote, a painting or a supposed relic) depend on how we relate it
to its source?
93:3 July
2010
Philosophical History of Science
Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2009
Advisory Editor: Niccolo Guicciardini (University of Bergamo) <niccolo.guicciardini@fastwebnet.it>
The cultural turn in the history
of science has displaced the once common view of science as a system of thought
with a new conception of science as a social or cultural phenomenon. This trend
has driven a wedge between the history of science as sociocultural process and
epistemological or methodological questions about science as a system of
thought. As a result, the more traditional philosophical history of science, in
which the system of thought is at the center and our present knowledge provides
the language in which past science is discussed, is in disfavor. Nonetheless a
few thinkers have swum against this tide, notably Howard Stein, in whose work
the concepts of present science are used uncompromisingly in the study of early
modern and even ancient science.
We invite contributions
re-examining the methodological debates about the history of science and
focusing on specific analyses such as those to be found in Stein's work. Our
goal is to avoid the endlessly repeated generalities that have made these
debates so fruitless in recent years. We welcome contributions both for and
against the received rejection of a philosophically-minded approach to the
history of science.
93:4
October 2010
Powers
Deadline for submissions: October 31, 2009
Advisory Editor: Neil Williams (University at Buffalo) <new@buffalo.edu>
A sewing needle is swiped across
a bar magnet, then pushed through a piece of cork and dropped into a glass of
water. The needle will point immediately to the nearest pole. A female moth
releases a small trace of sex pheromone; immediately males of the species up to
two miles away will be attracted to her. The evidence for such causal powers is
all around us. And as is shown in the response to the work of authors such as
George Molnar and C. B. Martin, the thought that objects might be inherently
powerful is on the rise. What is the nature of such causal powers? How are they
to be characterised? What place do non-powers have within power-based
ontologies? To what extent can powers be explanatory? Can powers exist entirely
ungrounded? Contributions are invited addressing these and connected issues
about the role and nature of powers.
94:1 January 2011
The Architecture of Reality
Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2010
Advisory Editor: Matthew
H. Slater (University of Idaho) <matthew.slater@uidaho.edu>
Humans are dividers and systematizers, confidently wielding the classificatory
knife in the natural sciences and in metaphysics alike. But are we carving
nature at its joints? We can identify distinct ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’
components to this basic question. Horizontal: Is the world ‘intrinsically
jointed’? Are there natural properties or natural kinds? Are there natural
units which instantiate these properties and kinds? Vertical: Is reality
divided into levels? If so, is there a fundamental level comprising reality’s
ultimate furniture? If not, what? Presumably, these two sets of questions
intersect. But how, precisely? What, in short, is the architecture of reality?
Might we require multiple ‘architectural plans’ to describe nature correctly,
or would just one do? We invite contributions on both the ground- level
metaphysical issues (proposals for particular architectures or particular
approaches to plan-drawing) and to methodological issues concerning these efforts.
94:2 April 2011
Morality and Climate
Change
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2010
Advisory Editors: Simon Caney (Oxford University) <simon.caney@magd.ox.ac.uk> and
Derek Bell (University of Newcastle) < derek.bell@ncl.ac.uk>
The
prospect of human induced climate change raises many ethical issues. What
criteria should we use to assess the impacts of climate change? Can cost
benefit analysis capture all the ethically significant impacts? Do
current generations have an obligation to future generations not to bring about
long-term dangerous climate change? Is discounting the well-being of
future generations obligatory or permissible or indefensible? Some
potential impacts of climate change are not known with certainty and this
raises the question of how we should respond to risky or uncertain impacts on
the earth's climate. For example, should current generations adopt a
version of the 'precautionary principle' when considering whether to engage in
activities which produce high levels of greenhouse gases? Who should bear
the burdens of dealing with global climate change? How should the right to
engage in activities which emit carbon dioxide be distributed? Is carbon
trading just and, if so, under what conditions? Are some entitled to compensation
or reparations for the harmful effects of anthropogenic climate change?
In addition to the above, we face ethical question pertaining to how decisions
about climate policy should be taken. Papers are invited on any of the above
themes.
94:3 July 2011
Cosmopolitanism: For and Against
Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2010
Advisory Editor: Gillian Brock (The University of Auckland)<g.brock@auckland.ac.nz>
According to cosmopolitanism, every person has global stature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal respect and consideration no matter what her citizenship status or other affiliations happen to be. This issue of The Monist is intended as a forum for debates about the pros and cons of cosmopolitanism. It will address questions such as: What does cosmopolitanism require by way of obligations of justice to all? What kinds of reforms to our global and local institutions do cosmopolitan concerns require? Are these requirements feasible? In addition to our obligations to everyone, do we have further, more demanding, obligations to compatriots or to family members? Do non-cosmopolitan theories provide a better account of our obligations and allow us a more useful framework for mediating the interests of compatriots and non-compatriots?