Jc Beall's Divine Contradiction proposes a bold response to the so-called ‘logical’ problems of the Trinity: we should admit without embarrassment that divine reality is flat-out contradictory. Beall defends his proposal against a wide range of objections and contends that it enjoys various philosophical and theological virtues, including the virtues of metaphysical and epistemological neutrality. While I agree that ceteris paribus these are desirable, I question whether the possession of these virtues really gives Beall's approach any advantage over its competitors when the chips are finally counted.

As in many areas of pre-Reformation devotion, the dead were a conspicuous presence in English religious guilds of all sizes. Members joined in the expectation that the guild would say prayers and perform masses for their souls after death, and previous members and benefactors would be commemorated with regularity. This article, however, investigates a new avenue of the fraternal relationship with the dead: the practice of enrolling people after their death. Doing so shifts the paradigm of our understanding of the multidimensional functions of pre-Reformation society, commemoration, and guilds, privileging the experiences of both the dead and living equally, while highlighting the interplay of the spiritual and socioeconomic. Taking the extensive membership records of England's “great” guilds as its basis, this article reveals that postmortem enrollment was a practice both common and widespread, and it addresses questions of practicalities and motivations. As such, the richness of commemoration in late medieval society is demonstrated, and the importance of postmortem membership brought to the fore.

I explore the promise of Beall's proposal for a long-standing challenge for traditional theology. I first offer a sketch of the problem and a brief overview of some of the more common responses to it. I then show how Beall's proposal holds initial promise; following this I highlight some concerns and raise some questions.

Real human agents, even when they are rational by everyday standards, sometimes assign different credences to objectively equivalent statements, such as ‘Orwell is a writer’ and ‘E.A. Blair is a writer’, or credences less than 1 to necessarily true statements, such as not-yet-proven theorems of arithmetic. Anna Mahtani calls this the phenomenon of ‘opacity’. Opaque credences seem probabilistically incoherent, which goes against a key modelling assumption of probability theory. I sketch a modelling strategy for capturing opaque credence assignments without abandoning probabilistic coherence. I draw on ideas from judgement-aggregation theory, where we face similar challenges of defining the ‘objects of judgement’.

Stalnaker’s ‘Assertion’ (1978 [1999]) offers a classic account of diagonalization as an approach to the meaning of a declarative sentence in context. Here I explore the relationship between diagonalization and some puzzles in Mahtani’s book The Objects of Credence. Diagonalization can influence how we think about both credence and desirability, so it influences both components of a standard expected utility equation. In that vein, I touch on two of Mahtani’s case-studies, chance and the finite version of the Two Envelope Paradox.

The fact that migration cases seldom raise any questions under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is neither inevitable nor justified. This article reaffirms the equality provision as a useful and indeed necessary mechanism for the European Court of Human Rights to deal with such applications. More concretely, we build on our previous work, which identified a legal tool suitable for achieving this reorientation in judicial practice: the principle that we call ‘migratory vulnerability’, once recalibrated away from a group-based approach to a notion of vulnerability as situational and socially induced. In this article, we explain how the principle of migratory vulnerability, even if it does not represent an inherently suspect ground of differentiation, enables us to identify instances of discrimination defined as a measurable disadvantage that is disproportionate or arbitrary and cannot, therefore, be reasonably justified on the basis of the Convention. This presupposes a move away from nationality as a privileged ground in migration-related cases and from the ‘comparator’ test to determine Article 14 ECHR violations, to also encompass situational experiences. We end with two examples that show that this reconceptualization is both workable in practice and of added value, enabling the Court to find violations that presently go undetected.

It is now over ten years since the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) first established that asylum seekers are inherently and particularly vulnerable on account of their very situation as asylum seekers. This occurred in its Grand Chamber judgment in the case of M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece. This article critically examines the Court’s subsequent asylum jurisprudence through the lens of vulnerability. The analysis reveals that the Court has engaged in ‘vulnerability backsliding’. Specifically, it traces the ways in which the Court has surreptitiously reversed the very principle of asylum vulnerability it itself established in M.S.S. The consequence of this backsliding is not only that the judicially recognised concept of asylum vulnerability is undermined, but that some of the most vulnerable applicants that come before the Court suffer renewed marginalisation, and, in some circumstances, exclusion from the ‘special protection’ to which they were previously afforded courtesy of M.S.S.

First, Mahtani argues that both in the game The Mug and in the Sleeping Beauty we should not defer to a trusted person under a particular designation if they do not self-identify under this designation. This invites a more complex Reflection Principle. I respond that there are more parsimonious ways to avoid the challenges posed to the Reflection Principle. Second, Mahtani argues that preferences create a hyperintensional context, which poses a challenge to the Ex-Ante Pareto Principle that can be averted by supervaluation. I respond that such an appeal to supervaluation would block randomization as a fair allocation device.

The traditional drafting and subsequent implementation of international refugee law have been criticised for relying on a male-centric understanding of persecution. Whilst this framework has recently shifted to include a more gender-sensitive interpretation, I argue that this introduction of gender within refugee status determination has traditionally relied on narratives infused with gendered and racialised stereotypes. In particular, it relies on a ‘white saviour’ colonial narrative that perceives refugee women as vulnerable victims in need of saving. Drawing on a decolonial and critical epistemological analysis that includes both a race and gender dimension, I unpack the epistemic violence and hidden colonial legacies in the representation of refugee women in case-law. Ultimately, this article concludes with a call for reframing the legal narrative around refugee women by approaching them as political actors rather than oppressed and vulnerable subjects.

States’ bordering practices force individuals to undertake dangerous migratory journeys and put them at risk of severe human rights violations. Yet, irregular arrivals who are found not to be at risk of serious harm in their countries of origin are perceived as voluntary migrants and are therefore assumed not to be in need of protection. This article employs the concept of vulnerability to challenge the idea that both the initial and subsequent dangerous migratory journeys are undertaken voluntarily. Based on an analysis of trafficking-based asylum claims from the UK and Germany, the article shows that both re-trafficking and irregular re-migration result from vulnerabilities which converge to preclude reintegration in the country of origin and access to livelihood options. While some of these vulnerabilities are likely to be present at the time of the initial dangerous journey already, the article pays particular attention to ‘consequential vulnerabilities’ brought about by previous migration experiences. It then introduces the concept of ‘route causes’ of irregular re-migration to describe factors which heighten the risk of re-migrating irregularly and therefore establish a risk on return related to harm experienced during irregular migration, rather than in the country of origin. Thus, the article shows that the vulnerability concept informs the future risk analysis in refugee law and argues that, just like a risk of re-trafficking, a risk of irregular re-migration could form the basis of an asylum claim.

In Chapter 6 of Objects of Credence, Anna Mahtani argues that the opacity of credence raises difficulties for the Principal Principle and proposes a revised principle relating credence and chance that avoids it. In this comment on her book, I both defend Mahtani’s proposed principle against a charge of triviality and argue that the opacity of belief does not threaten the role of chance in guiding credence.

This article aims to reflect on ‘ecological vulnerability’ – which makes evident the relationship, flows and interactions between the human being/body and the environment/non-human world – as applied in the context of environmentally induced migration. In particular, the dual role of the law vis-à-vis environmentally displaced migrants as a generator and exacerbator of their vulnerability as well as potential antidote, valuable for attaining protection, will be highlighted. Namely, on one hand, the analysis will show how a lack of conceptualisation of the notion to understand the spatial and temporal patterns of climate change-related migration, as well as its consequences for societal well-being, contributes to generate and exacerbate the vulnerability of that category of migrants. On the other hand, the critical understanding of vulnerability, as developed in some recent legal reasoning of international and national jurisdictions, will be proposed as a key element for ensuring the resilience of both environmental migrants and the law itself, for both virtuously expanding traditional asylum norms and flexibilising access to international protection for those migrants.

This article traces characterizations of the Cupbearer fresco, named after the large vessel the figure holds and uncovered at the site of Knossos in 1900, in light of the research agendas about the ‘races’ of the prehistoric Aegean and traditions of racial science current in late Victorian Britain. The head of the Cupbearer was compared to Classical Greek art, modern Cretan populations, and cranial remains from prehistoric contexts. Drawing from academic publications, articles in the press, and reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the author situates the discourse surrounding the Cupbearer in the context of scholars seeking the origins of ‘European’ civilization in prehistory, and the creation of racial typologies, especially using cranial measurements and photography. The Cupbearer gained a dual status as a racial portrait comparable to past and present human populations, but also as a work of art that prefigured the later achievements of Classical Greece.

Based on Nathan Goldstein’s case report, “But I have a pacer…there is no point in engaging in hypothetical scenarios”: A Non-imminently Dying Patient’s Request for Pacemaker Deactivation, it is reasonable to conclude that it was, all-things-considered, ethically appropriate to grant the patient’s request to deactivate her pacemaker. Philosophically, and as a clinical bioethicist, I support the team’s decision to honor the patient’s request for pacemaker deactivation. However, it is worth exploring a bit further whether the distress on the part of the outside hospital’s ethics committee and providers—who declined to honor the patient’s request for pacemaker deactivation—may actually track something of moral significance. Might their discomfort around deactivation be “truth-tracking” in moral terms?

This article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores the multilayered, shifting dimension of their precarious and gendered labour. Engaging with key questions raised by historians of Italian Fascism and by feminist research in film and media history, the article delineates intersectional barriers to film employment faced by women in the years of the dictatorship and points to their historical legacy.

This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually considered the less valuable the farther in the future they are obtained. The utilities of those things are discounted at a certain rate. The paper presents a novel normative argument for exponential discount rates, whatever their empirical adequacy. It proposes to take indexical utility seriously, i.e. utilities referring to indexical propositions (that speak of ‘I’, ‘now’, etc.) as opposed to non-indexical propositions. Economic focus is only on the latter, while the former are neglected. The potential ignorance of when is now generates a difference between indexical and non-indexical utility that can be exploited for a novel argument in favour of exponential discount rates.

This article raises the question of whether bioethics qualifies as a discipline. According to a standard definition of discipline as “a field of study following specific and well-established methodological rules” bioethics is not a specific discipline as there are no explicit “well-established methodological rules.” The article investigates whether the methodological rules can be implicit, and whether bioethics can follow specific methodological rules within subdisciplines or for specific tasks. As this does not appear to be the case, the article examines whether bioethics’ adherence to specific quality criteria (instead of methodological rules) or pursuing of a common goal can make it qualify as a discipline. Unfortunately, the result is negative. Then, the article scrutinizes whether referring to bioethics institutions and professional qualifications can ascertain bioethics as a discipline. However, this makes the definition of bioethics circular. The article ends by admitting that bioethics can qualify as a discipline according to broader definitions of discipline, for example, as an “area of knowledge, research and education.” However, this would reduce bioethics’ potential for demarcation and identity-building. Thus, to consolidate the discipline of bioethics and increase its impact, we should explicate and elaborate on its methodology.