The Paradox of the Benefiting Samaritan

Many persons believe that benefiting from injustice can be morally wrong. Philosophers have developed several compelling theories to justify this intuition. These theories, however, may have a difficult time explaining a particular set of benefit-from-injustice cases: cases in which the beneficiary subjectively opposes the injustice from which she objectively benefits. This paper suggests that our moral duties to disgorge the benefits of injustice may vary in proportion to our subjective intent in acquiring and using those benefits. In doing so, it reasons by analogy to other areas of moral and legal theory, including principles of compensation for unjust harms

From the Editor

[Excerpt] Welcome to Issue no. 2 of Practical Technology for Archives. As with our first issue this issue has a digital focus. It is understandable that this should be the case since many archivists work extensively with digital tools and increasingly have to deal with born-digital records. I would, however, like to stress that we would welcome submissions on analog tools as well. We also welcome submissions in the form of audio or video clips. Hopefully, in future issues we will see a greater diversity in both content and format

The sonnets of Seamus Heaney in Spanish

This paper seeks to offer a more nuanced and further-reaching exploration of the translation of all of Seamus Heaney’s sonnets into a Spanish ‘collected’, lead by the Mexican poet Pura López-Colomé. Taking in critical thinking on creativity and the ‘post-colonial’ sonnet as well as Heaney’s and López-Colomé’s own views and metaphorics relating to literary translation, this paper asks not only what Sonetos brings to the originals, but what they bring also to poetry and translation. The paper argues that Sonetos offers a distinct insight into questions of semantic faithfulness and the translator’s visibility, but also that whilst we must eschew metaphysical or essentialist language in analysis, the project of Sonetos has also been to communicate not just original poetry’s, but also translation’s qualities as a strategy of (secular) revelation

Coherence for Categorified Operadic Theories

It has long been known that every weak monoidal category A is equivalent via monoidal functors and monoidal natural transformations to a strict monoidal category st(A). We generalise the definition of weak monoidal category to give a definition of weak P-category for any strongly regular (operadic) theory P, and show that every weak P-category is equivalent via P-functors and P-transformations to a strict P-category. This strictification functor is then shown to have an interesting universal property.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure. Presented at 82nd PSSL, Glasgow, May 200

Comments on Knowledge and Ideology: The Epistemology of Social and Political Critique

Michael Morris' Knowledge and Ideology is an original and valuable contribution to the philosophical debate concerning the meaning and validity of the concept of ideology critique. While the concept of ideology has occupied a pivotal role within the tradition of critical social theory, as Terry Eagleton had already pointed out in his 1994 study, the term nevertheless has "a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with one another." Morris takes Eagleton's analysis as his point of departure, distinguishing between "epistemic" and "functional" varieties of ideology critique. Unlike Eagleton's earlier study, however, which focused on the historical development of these two dominant ways of conceiving ideology, Morris' work attempts to show how the cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions of belief can be productively reconciled in a "Neo-Hegelian variation of epistemic ideology critique." Morris' work makes a compelling case that critical social theory can be sensitive to the social dimensions of belief without abandoning the legitimate goals of the traditional epistemological project. I have some questions, however, regarding how he proposes to reconcile these two competing visions of ideology critique