This article brings to the forefront Timothy Brennan’s emphasis on Edward Said’s engagement with philosophy. An attempt is made to reconstruct some of Brennan’s claims about Said’s views on the relationship between mental representations and the external world. It is shown that Said rejected naïve or direct realism in favor of representationalism. It is also argued that, despite being seen as a post-modern thinker, Said subscribed to a version of the correspondence theory of truth. Said embraced some form of standpoint epistemology, but he did not think that this had any direct bearing on how we should think about what makes a given claim true. Finally, an attempt is made to understand the relationship between Said’s project and the classical Marxist project of ideology critique, as well as contemporary attempts to develop an epistemology of ignorance.

This article concerns the endurance of political traditions brought to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century from the revolutionary milieu in Imperial Russia. The Russian Empire and its neighbors, which form most of today’s Eastern Europe and large swaths of Central Europe, was the homeland of most early Zionist settlers. They had acquired experience in a range of clandestine political organizations in the Russian Empire. It is this revolutionary experience that constitutes the bedrock of Russian Zionists’ influence on the political culture of the pre-state Palestine and Israel. Later, those who found themselves in Poland after Versailles became familiar with parliamentary rituals, even though the Polish state did not enjoy democracy for long. We suggest that this seemingly distant history continues to manifest itself in the political culture of contemporary Israel. We consider epistemology, tradition, ideology, and political action while looking at Israeli politics through the lens of its Russian roots.

In this article, we explore the status of Samaritans in early modern Ottoman Damascus through a focus on a particular firman—a sultanic legal decree. The firman orders that Samaritans—a religious group that traces its origins to ancient Israel but differs from Jews in several aspects—are not to be employed as clerks by Ottoman authorities. We argue that the firman indicates Ottoman officials engaged in religious status management despite the lack of legal terminology for minority in the document. The significance of the firman regarding conceptualizing status, we suggest, is that it points to an alternative model of minoritization that is not based in modern European legal approaches to religious minority status and law but which accounts for people’s experiences of minority status before modernity.

This paper investigates nga-marked numerals in Albanian. They qualify as distributive numerals, since the presence of nga on the numeral yields a distributive reading of the sentences they belong to. Beyond their differences, most of the previous accounts rely on the hypothesis that distributive numerals introduce some kind of semantic feature, e.g. a covariation feature; an evaluation plurality requirement, also called a post-suppositional plurality requirement; or a distributivity force. Our main claim goes against this trend of thinking. We propose that distributive numerals do not carry any semantic feature but only a formal syntactic feature that needs to enter a syntactic dependency relation with a distributivity feature. The analysis is implemented in terms of Zeijlstra’s (2004) upward agree.

Reflecting the international experience, statistics show that most medical negligence cases in Ireland settle. Less is known, however, about the duration of these cases, though anecdotal evidence suggests that they are protracted in nature. Procedurally focused reforms, aimed at reducing costs and facilitating more expedient resolution of these disputes have been proposed in Ireland, yet await implementation. As such, the pace of litigation is largely determined by the parties to the dispute. Drawing on the findings of an empirical study (an analysis of closed case files and qualitative interviews), this article explores two questions: first, how long do medical negligence cases take to resolve; and secondly, what contributes to delay in this context. Whilst causes of delay may vary by case, it is important to attempt to identify and explore common factors which contribute to delay. If these factors can be problematised and understood, possible solutions may be reached. In doing so, the article contributes to the debate on medical negligence reform across common law jurisdictions, evidencing the broader considerations, in addition to procedurally focused reforms, which are required when considering the issue of delay.

China's rise has been discussed in various ways, but only recently has scholarship started to examine it in relation to overseas Chinese, as politicians and commentators outside China, as well as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself and some scholars on “smart power” have come to realize their importance as political messengers of China. This paper analyses interview results with second-generation Chinese immigrants in Australia in tertiary education to examine how they are “telling the China story”. The results reveal this cohort's complex attitudes towards China's rise. On the one hand, they are proud of China's rise, especially in economic terms, and their socio-cultural attachment to it. On the other, they critically evaluate political and social issues in China, and are aware of their marginal position in Chinese society. These findings argue against the oversimplistic approach that regards Chinese immigrants as a homogenous group acting as political messengers of the CCP.

In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. However, this work will be difficult, because we lack the same kinds of commonalities across substrates that we have within them. Fortunately, we might be able to make at least some intersubstrate welfare comparisons responsibly in spite of these issues. We make the case for cautious optimism and call for more research.

This article examines anti-mask protests in the United States in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, I look at the cultural (mis)appropriation of slogans by anti-mask protestors, such as “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice.” Noting that this is at first glance a bit of a puzzling phenomenon, I show that there is a relationship between the anti-mask protest, white Christian grievance politics, and the disintegration of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Bonnie Honig, I argue that the anti-mask protests represent a mode of opting out of public engagement, hence opting out of the practice of using rational argumentation to explain why things ought to be a certain way, as well as listening to the reasons of others. Insofar as this has become a popular mode of engagement among a significant number of Americans, it needs to be understood in the language of foregoing responsibility for others in US pluralistic democracy. Indeed, further explication of the relationship between responsibility and freedom is absolutely necessary. I maintain that opting out is ethically untenable because of the nature of interdependence with others and the necessity of adhering to the rule of law. An ethic of reciprocity properly grounds an understanding of embodied freedom, resisting the extremes of grievance politics.

While sin-based responses to divine hiddenness arguments are a road less travelled, they do nonetheless have a number of defenders in the contemporary divine hiddenness literature. I begin this article by exploring the various strategies that have been employed to attempt to motivate such accounts. What none of these strategies seem to take into account, however, is a cluster of facts about the correlation (or lack thereof) between a person's propositional attitudes about God and the degree to which that person displays the relevant moral and intellectual virtues. This article aims to fill this lacuna by mapping out the options available to defenders of sin-based responses in trying to cope with this cluster of facts. I argue that there may be resources available for preserving some aspects of the sin-based approach, but that taking stock of the aforementioned facts will ultimately require the positing of causal factors besides sin in order to generate a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon of non-belief.

Suppose that people seek confidentiality in what would otherwise be a public process—such as litigating or applying for a firearms license—because they are afraid that publicly identifying them will stigmatize them in their (or their families’) religious communities. Should the law allow them to proceed anonymously to better protect their interests and to avoid discouraging their lawsuits or applications? Or would that unduly stigmatize the religious community by branding it as improperly censorious or judgmental—or interfere with religious community members’ ability to evaluate for themselves how their coreligionists are using the courts and other government processes?

The article explores the connection between the rule of law and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion from an empirical and theoretical perspective. The author posits that the two are not merely interdependent, but that freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is foundational for embedding the rule of law because a state needs to facilitate freedom of thought, conscience, and religion to encourage the exploration of virtue to inform consensus around society’s common norms. This virtue-building role of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion gives the human right its foundational role for creating the conditions required for embedding the rule of law. This conclusion is drawn from Martin Krygier’s analysis of the sociological conditions necessary to embed the rule of law and a comparison of the worldwide rule of law, religious freedom, and happiness indexes. To support a universal approach to the human right and to underpin the identified essentiality of it, the author proposes a theoretical approach grounded in the theory of common grace; Rowan Williams’s other-regarding communal approach to rights; and the framework for plural living together proposed by Herman Dooyeweerd. The author posits that this approach could be adapted with a plural metanarrative to accommodate dialogue around virtue building and dispute resolution within societies with very different outlooks.

This article investigates the transformation of the body of a female child murderer as she passed through specific spatial configurations in the urban setting of the seventeenth-century capital of Denmark–Norway. By using the case of Gertrud Nielsdatter, we explore the significance of public urban spaces in the bodily and material transformation of a woman from a condemned sinner to an object of scientific wonder. This transformation was facilitated by practices in diverse public spaces – controlled or influenced by government, city, church, as well as academic authorities and stakeholders – such as the city court, the place of execution, the university and, not least, the book shops across Europe selling books containing the print representing internal organs of Gertrud Nielsdatter. The case demonstrates how the physical body of an ordinary – yet outlawed – Copenhagener was repeatedly transformed in interaction with public spaces and the material culture of buildings, fixtures and fittings.

This article situates psychoanalysis, urbanity, and precarity apropos of the material, affective, and memory economy of the mutable metropolis marked by visuality, velocity, and violence. Responding to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, the article examines the interplay of visibility and invisibility in a metropolis and how that is in close and complex correspondence to the politics of precarity and privilege. Drawing on historical as well as recent research in psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, and cultural studies across various geopolitical settings, this article, through a response to and reading of Mukherjee’s book, aims to articulate and illustrate the unique relevance of literature and aesthetic education in a study of mental health conditions in the (un)seen city. It argues that such psychic and social situations may be uniquely encoded and addressed with ethics and empathy through the cognitive interiority and symbolic instrumentality afforded by the affective and liminal framework of aesthetic activity and fiction.

J. M. Coetzee’s late work exhibits a productive dialogue between fiction and other arts as part of his interest in the possibilities of thinking in mediums other than ordinary language. Focusing particularly on the Jesus novels, this article examines the critical role of music and how Coetzee uses musical forms as literary strategies that open up alternative possibilities of communication and thinking. Revisiting the famous “What is a Classic?” essay and the biographical moment that leads Coetzee to the music of J. S. Bach, I look at how Coetzee writes musically by considering questions of content, form, and technique, and then turn to the representation of music in relation to mathematics. I propose that the interest in music in the Jesus novels is part of his conscious engagement with ordinary language and his inherent desire to transcend it that characterizes the late work.

This article analyzes the print culture of the Black and multiethnic community known as L8 in the northern British city of Liverpool. Through a critique of printed materials, including newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets all written, produced and read within the locale, the author assesses the construction of a community that was at once imagined and lived. This print infrastructure facilitated a collective sense of L8 as a marker of identity and belonging in a city and a nation that otherwise often harbored racialized hostility to the residents’ economic and political interests. Such a commitment to the locale, the author asserts, became a key factor in organizing the collective action taken by the residents in the 1981 Toxteth protests. Before and after that event, the neighborhood's print culture served to justify to residents the reasons for taking violent action against the state. Equally, this source material highlights the fissures and divergences between neighbors in their deliberations over the definitions—and limitations—of such a community and its relation to the nation. The author thus offers new ways to think about Black British protest in close relation to the specific political and social dynamics of neighborhoods across Britain.