Cosmopolitan presumptions? On Martha Nussbaum and her commentators

This article presents a framework for analysis of discourses on ethical cosmopolitanism, and applies it to Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice (2006), with comparisons to the views of other authors. After outlining the book's form of ethical cosmopolitanism, the article considers the psychological, philosophical and sociological presumptions, the methodology of abstraction, the implicit audiences, and the programmatic targets and implied strategy of social change. It links and comments on sister papers by Giri, McCloskey, Murphy, Nederveen Pieterse and Truong

Team 8: Investigation of the Impact of Ship Loading Strategies on USMC MPF Arrival and Assembly

from Scythe : Proceedings and Bulletin of the International Data Farming Community, Issue 9 Workshop 21The U.S. Marine Corps' Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF) enables the rapid deployment of Marine forces to permissive areas of operations. The MPF consists of more then a dozen ships divided between three squadrons. Each squadron supports a notional Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) and is based in one of three locations: the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, or the Mediterranean

Philosophy Enters the Optics Laboratory: Bell's Theorem and its First Experimental Tests (1965-1982)

This paper deals with the ways that the issue of completing quantum mechanics was brought into laboratories and became a topic in mainstream quantum optics. It focuses on the period between 1965, when Bell published what now we call Bell's theorem, and 1982, when Aspect published the results of his experiments. I argue that what was considered good physics after Aspect's experiments was once considered by many a philosophical matter instead of a scientific one, and that the path from philosophy to physics required a change in the physics community's attitude about the status of the foundations of quantum mechanics.Comment: 57 pages, accepted by Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physic

Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge, Action, and Cosmopolitanism

Facing challenges to the civic purpose of higher education, some scholars and administrators turn to the rhetoric of engagement. Simultaneously, the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has gained intellectual favor, advocating openness to the lived experiences of distant others. We articulate linkages between these two discourses in an extended case study, finding that a cosmopolitan ethos of engagement in a rural context can improve (1) understanding among people ordinarily separated by spatialized social-ecological differences, (2) prospects for longer term environmental sustainability, and (3) the visionary potential of collaborative inquiry. Despite globalization of food systems and neoliberal shifts in fishery management, an annual fisheries forum facilitates coalitions that overcome dichotomies between technocratic and local knowledge, extending benefits to fishing communities, academia, and public policy. Iterative and loosely structured capacity building expands informally through affective processes of recognition and care, as decentralized leadership supports collective mobilization toward alternate futures

Why Should Ecosystem Services Be Governed to Support Poverty Alleviation? Philosophical Perspectives on Positions in the Empirical Literature

In light of trade-offs related to the allocation of ecosystem services we investigate the prevalent norms that are drawn upon to justify why ecosystem governance should prioritise poverty alleviation. We are specifically concerned with poverty alleviation because we consider this an urgent problem of justice. We review empirical literature on social trade-offs in ecosystem services governance in order to identify the prevalent conceptions of justice that inform scholarly assessments of current practice. We find that empirical studies do present specific notions of justice as desirable benchmarks for ecosystem services governance but that they rarely attempt to spell out the precise meaning of these notions or what makes them desirable. For those notions of justice that we identify in this literature - sufficientarianism, egalitarianism and participatory approaches - we draw on philosophical justice literature in order to better articulate the normative arguments that could support them and to be more precise about the kind of actions and expectations that they invoke. Moreover, we point to some striking normative silences in the ecosystem services literature. We conclude that the ecosystem services justice discourse would benefit from more conceptual clarity and a broader examination of different aspects of justice

Articulating ‘public interest’ through complexity theory

The ‘Public interest’, even if viewed with ambiguity or scepticism, has been one of the primary means by which various professional roles of planners have been justified. Many objections to the concept have been advanced by writers in planning academia. Notwithstanding these, ‘public interest’ continues to be mobilised, to justify, defend or argue for planning interventions and reforms. This has led to arguments that planning will have to adopt and recognise some form of public interest in practice to legitimise itself.. This paper explores current debates around public interest and social justice and advances a vision of the public interest informed by complexity theory. The empirical context of the paper is the poverty alleviation programme, the Kudumbashree project in Kerala, India

Human(e) rights and the cosmopolitan imagination: questions of human dignity and cultural identity

Here I seek to explore the cosmopolitan foundations of the idea of human rights. The argument begins by considering the popularity of the idea of human rights in a globalized and fast-moving commodified and digital culture. At this point I consider whether the idea of human rights might be considered to be a modern utopia similar to the role that art and nature played in the Romantic movements of the 19th century. Further, I defend human rights against those who simply see it as a form of neoliberalism or as largely ineffective against the power of the state. At this point I investigate some of the Durkheimian work within cultural sociology that has sought to investigate human rights as a form of moral community. The main problem with this view is that it has little to say about human freedom. However, viewed through a cultural lens, the global spread of human rights is connected to the idea of human dignity. While there is never likely to be a global consensus on this term, it does retain an important philosophical anchoring in Kantian ideas. More recently this debate has been revived by the critical reception of the work of Agamben and his idea of ‘bare life’. If human rights can indeed be connected to the struggle for a dignified and meaningful life, then the idea of ‘bare life’ remains an important conceptual advance. However, by considering the work and legacy of Du Bois, Gilroy and others, we can also see how the term dignity might take on other meanings in different settings. Finally, I argue that the idea of dignity and human rights could yet provide an important focus for resistance against the imperatives of capital and state in these neoliberal times