Towards a politics for human rights: Ambiguous humanity and democratizing rights

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. These criticisms are pursued with varying intensities, as some defenders of human rights are willing to accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, while staunch opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in language of human rights because of the deep pathologies of rights-thinking as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this paper, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of “humanity”as a political identity, and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics

Agency and alienation

Book synopsis: Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the "naturalist" credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists--whether human or nonhuman. The new faith says science, not man, is the measure of all things. However, there is a growing skepticism about the adequacy of this complacent orthodoxy. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism. The many prominent Anglo-American philosophers appearing in this book--Akeel Bilgrami, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, John Dupré, Jennifer Hornsby, Erin Kelly, John McDowell, Huw Price, Hilary Putnam, Carol Rovane, Barry Stroud, and Stephen White--do not march in lockstep, yet their contributions demonstrate mutual affinities and various unifying themes. Instead of attempting to force human nature into a restricted scientific image of the world, these papers represent an attempt to place human nature at the center of renewed--but still scientifically respectful--conceptions of philosophy and nature

The Evolution of Radio Loud Active Galactic Nuclei as a Function of Black Hole Spin

Recent work on the engines of active galactic nuclei jets suggests their power depends strongly and perhaps counter-intuitively on black hole spin. We explore the consequences of this on the radio-loud population of active galactic nuclei and find that the time evolution of the most powerful radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars fits into a picture in which black hole spin varies from retrograde to prograde with respect to the accreting material. Unlike the current view, according to which jet powers decrease in tandem with a global downsizing effect, we argue for a drop in jet power resulting directly from the paucity of retrograde accretion systems at lower redshift $z$ caused by a continuous history of accretion dating back to higher $z$. In addition, the model provides simple interpretations for the basic spectral features differentiating radio-loud and radio-quiet objects, such as the presence or absence of disk reflection, broadened iron lines and signatures of disk winds. We also briefly describe our models' interpretation of microquasar state transitions. We highlight our result that the most radio-loud and most radio-quiet objects both harbor highly spinning black holes but in retrograde and prograde configurations, respectively.Comment: MNRAS accepte

There is Nothing It is Like to See Red: Holism and Subjective Experience

The Nagel inspired “something-it-is-like” (SIL) conception of conscious experience remains a dominant approach in philosophy. In this paper I criticize a prevalent philosophical construal of SIL consciousness, one that understands SIL as a property of mental states rather than entities as a whole. I argue against thinking of SIL as a property of states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, under-warranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I then develop a holistic conception of SIL for entities (not states) and argue that it has at least equal pre-empirical warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair,” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work

Exploring continuous organisational transformation as a form of network interdependence

In this paper we examine the problematic area of continuous transformation. We conduct our analysis from three theoretical perspectives: the resource based view, social network theory, and stakeholder theory. We found that the continuous transformation can be explained through the concept of Network Interdependence. This paper describes Network Interdependence and develops theoretical propositions from a synthesis of the three theories. Our contribution of Network Interdependence offers fresh insights into managing complex change and offers new ways of looking at organisational transformation

Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach, Part I: Causes

We propose a new definition of actual cause, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for other definitions and resolves major difficulties in the traditional account.Comment: Part II of the paper (on Explanation) is also on the arxiv. Previously the two parts were submitted as one paper. To appear in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Scienc