This article argues that banks should adopt animal welfare policies in the light of the growing acceptance of the need for ‘responsible banking’, which incorporates environmental, social, and governance analysis into credit risk and due diligence processes. The responsibility of banks for animal welfare is underscored by the drive towards greater investment in animal agribusiness, and the vicious cycle through which animal agribusiness can both contribute to, and be impacted by, climate disruption. The article evaluates, through a desktop review, how leading Australian retail banks and agribusiness lenders are addressing animal welfare and climate disruption in animal agribusiness lending. We find that although most banks have made a commitment to animal welfare and climate policies, these often amount to little more than greenwashing. We call for an ecosystem of industry, regulatory, and civil society action to address this danger.

From 2015 up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Polish citizens have undergone a major decline in their willingness to allow foreigners to reside in Poland. The following text empirically investigates whether antipathy to newcomers is driven more by cultural or economic concerns, and what role the ethnicity of immigrants plays in this antagonism. The findings suggest that the ethnicity of immigrants is significant in both the salience of the expressed hostility and in the importance given to individual factors. When considering the acceptance of immigrants of different ethnicity, Poles are most concerned about preserving their national culture, whereas worries about the burden on the national economy are uppermost when considering ethnically similar newcomers. Antipathy against ethnically similar immigrants is also much weaker than against those of different ethnicity. The over-time comparison tells us that support for the government, religiosity, and opposition to universalism values became the most important predictors of restrictionism after 2015. We assume that the increase in anti-immigration attitudes was not that much caused by the unprecedented wave of immigration, but rather by the rule of the nationalist-conservative government which politicized the issue of non-European migration and contributed to the change of public discourse.

This article intends to explore how the production of collective memory within transitional justice processes could be considered as a feasible avenue to advance the instrumentalization of the Access to Remedy Pillar of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This account considers that collective memory is a fundamental component of transitional justice as the attainment of both victims reparation and national reconciliation require the emergence of a shared historical narrative that fixes an explanation as to the implications of violence on the trajectory of the affected society. Hence the current Colombian transitional justice project, and particularly certain social dialogue activities conducted by its Truth Commission (hereafter the Commission), are presented as an embryonic and non-exhaustive case study that serves as the starting point of further research on the matter.

Does God trust human persons? Very little in philosophy of religion has been written about God's trust, which seems striking for two joint considerations. First, many of the Abrahamic faith traditions posit that union and close personal relationship with God is the telos of human life. Second, trust seems to be an essential element in ideal, close relationships between persons. While there is much in the faith literature that emphasizes the role of trust on the human side of the divine–human relationship, there is very little on divine trust. To fill this lacuna, this article addresses the conceptual issue of how divine trust could be understood within the Abrahamic faith traditions (particularly in Christianity and Judaism). I begin by examining whether an account of divine trust can be developed alongside divine attributes like divine foreknowledge. After identifying some plausible conditions of trust within the philosophical literature, I present a couple of trust scenarios as a means of demonstrating that divine trust is not only conceptually plausible (i.e. compatible with divine foreknowledge), but that divine trust is best construed as a particular trust type – therapeutic trust. That is, I argue that divine trust aims at inspiring humanity's trustworthiness.

Rod Ellis is a Distinguished Research Professor at Curtin University (Perth, Australia) and also, an Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). He has also worked in universities in UK, Japan, and the USA and is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely in the related fields of second language acquisition research and task-based language teaching. He has won the British Association of Applied Linguists prize (1985), the Mildenberger prize (1987), The Duke of Edinburgh prize (1994), and the International Association of Task-based Teaching prize (2021). His current H-index on Google Scholar is 109.

I argue that the story of God's commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac can be read as a variant of Kavka's (1983) Toxin Puzzle. On this reading, Abraham has no reason to kill Isaac, only reason to intend to kill Isaac. On one version of the Kavkan reading, it's impossible for Abraham, thus situated, to form the intention to kill Isaac. This would make the binding an impossible story: I explore the ethical and theological consequences of reading the story in this way. Finally, I suggest that analytic philosophers may have more to contribute to interpretative projects in philosophical theology than generally practised.

This article considers whether any interpretation of the idea of equal claims to the natural world can resolve the Canyon Dilemma (i.e. can justify protecting the Grand Canyon but not a small canyon from mining by a poor generation). It first considers and ultimately rejects the idea of subjecting natural resource rights to an intergenerational equal division. It then demonstrates that a pluralist theory of environmental justice committed to both respect for the separateness of persons and to the collective good can justify a type of intergenerational non-absolute equal division of natural resource rights that can navigate the Canyon Dilemma.

This article introduces an intuitive conservation dilemma called the Canyon Dilemma: Is it possible to condemn the mining of the Grand Canyon, even by a poor generation, while also permitting this generation’s mining of an unremarkable small canyon? It then argues that not one of several prominent theories of environmental justice, including various forms of egalitarianism, welfarism, deep-ecological theories, communitarianism and free-market environmentalism, can navigate this dilemma. The article concludes by highlighting the dilemma-navigating potential of the equal-claims idea – the idea that the natural world is something to which every human being, present and future, has an equal, substantive claim.

A growing body of literature has shifted aesthetic attention from composition to performance, or the performing activity, and asserts that the act of performance creates meaning.1 Scholars have emphasized differences between the passive consumption and active making of – or even listening to – music.2 As I sought to understand the impact of performance on Alma Mahler's legacy, I identified the need to gather as much data as possible on who, what, where, when, why, and how her songs were performed. This need led me to evaluate the metadata associated with recordings of Alma Mahler's songs in the WorldCat union catalogue and the video sharing platform YouTube. Recent studies have shown the utility of leveraging big data for musicology, although few scholars have done so to investigate reception history. This essay outlines one approach to data scraping YouTube with emphasis on the value to those researching recent Lieder reception, and in doing so highlights some of the promise and limitations associated with web scraping.

In Utilitarianism, Mill defers to Alexander Bain's expertise on the subject of moral judgment to answer common criticisms of the creed. First, we do not blame people or label them immoral when they are less than ideal. Judgments of immorality are commonly reserved for substandard behavior, not suboptimal comportment. Second, we do not commonly insist on full neutrality in benevolence. Indeed, some philosophers argue that we are obliged to exhibit partiality, insofar as it is demanded by our roles as friends, parents, or children. My primary aim in this essay is to explicate Bain's theory of moral judgment and explain how Mill used Bain's psychological doctrines to inform his development of an indirect utilitarian moral philosophy, immune to the criticisms described above.

Up to now, a very large majority of work in the religious philosophy of life's meaning has presumed a conception of God that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this article I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion's salient conceptions of God as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from fulfilling God's purpose for us, would it be reasonable to prefer God as characteristically conceived by African philosophers of religion to exist instead of the Abrahamic conception of God? At this stage of enquiry, I answer that, in respect of the range of people to whom God's purpose would apply, a more African view of God would plausibly offer a greater meaning, but that, concerning what the content of God's purpose would be, the Abrahamic view appears to offer a greater one. I conclude by reflecting on this mixed verdict and by suggesting respects in which non-purposive facets of the African and Abrahamic conceptions of God could also have implications for life's meaning.

As the Chinese minister to the United States between 1889 and 1893, Cui Guoyin faced unprecedented pressures from the Qing government to achieve an alleviation of Chinese exclusion. However, American discrimination against Chinese escalated despite his tireless effort to stem it. The failure made him frustrated and especially sensitive to the issue of face. While finding it a useful tool to exonerate himself, Cui believed that face could also be helpful to Chinese bargaining with the United States over immigration. He incorporated this belief into his exchanges with the U.S. Department of State. At Cui's suggestion or at least agreeing with him, the Zongli Yamen referred to America's reputation as a pressure for concessions in its communications with the U.S. legation in Beijing as well. Such “weaponization” of face represents both an often ignored backward turn in late Qing's diplomatic mentality and the limit of its diplomatic leverage with the United States.

This paper reports the results of two acceptability judgment experiments that examine the effect of PP remnants with mismatching correlates in the antecedent clause (either a PP, with a distinct preposition, or an NP) on the acceptability of pseudogapping as well as non-elliptical controls. Across both experiments, three novel findings emerge: First, utterances with mismatching PPs across the ellipsis clause and its antecedent were consistently degraded relative to their preposition-matched counterparts. Second, this mismatch penalty arose for elliptical and non-elliptical variants alike with only minor differences between the two. Finally, a significant portion of the mismatch penalties was explained away by the degree of semantic similarity between the thematic relations established by the mismatching prepositions with respect to the antecedent verb which was measured in a separate norming experiment. We examine the consequences of these new empirical results for current theories of pseudogapping, namely (i) the remnant-raising analysis, according to which the remnant XP is raised leftward out of the VP prior to VP ellipsis, licensed under identity with its antecedent; and (ii) the direct generation analysis, under which auxiliaries are verbal proforms that recover their referent anaphorically without the need for remnant movement or syntactic identity between the verb and its antecedent. We conclude that the data are more naturally accounted for under the direct generation approach.

Hayes & Kaun (1996) argue that the mapping of syllables onto a metrical grid in textsetting is sensitive to natural duration, not just categorical weight (heavy or light). Most of their evidence, however, derives the final lengthening effects, which admit of another possible analysis (Halle 2004). Drawing on a corpus of 2,371 popular songs in English, I confirm that even when one controls for final lengthening and other factors, the setting of syllables to a discrete grid is sensitive to natural duration. Moreover, onset effects reveal that the domain of weight for textsetting is not the syllable, rime, or vowel-to-vowel interval, but rather the interval between p-centers (perceptual centers). Finally, I argue that the textsetting grammar invokes both natural duration and categorical weight; weight mapping cannot be reduced to one or the other.

The Austrian statesman Metternich is widely recognized as a leading actor in European affairs in the first half of the nineteenth century. What has been surprisingly neglected is the long-lasting impact of his nationality policy, which he devised and partly implemented within the context of restoring order after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The devastation and dislocations caused by two decades of warfare gave rise to a critical historical juncture in which Metternich took the lead to form a counterrevolutionary regime and to pursue what can be termed his empire project. A state modernizer, he devised an intellectually elaborate conservative response to the French Revolution that rested on his distinction between supposedly natural nationalities and artificial nationalism. The resulting idiosyncratic governance of empire fostered a vertical integration of societies-in-the-making through the expansion of state infrastructures, while at the same time determining horizontal fragmentation along provincial and linguistic lines. Metternich’s nationality policy helped to create the ideational and institutional foundations of modern nation-building across Central and Southeastern Europe. Its legacy outlasted the monarchy and is reflected in the distinctive culturalist tradition of nationhood in post-Habsburg Central Europe.

Writing Is Russia Fascist? was a difficult intellectual exercise, as it feels counterintuitive to spend years working on a concept, only to refute its validity. Yet it eventually brought more than I envisioned, helping me conceptualize the notion of illiberalism as a more accurate term for capturing the pre-war Russian regime’s ideological nature. Another important take I got from writing this book has been the centrality of memory wars for the whole of Europe, and the need to analyze Russia while looking in the mirror at “our” (read “Western”) own ambivalent, multi-voiced, memories of the 20th century. I am therefore grateful to the reviewers for their interest in the book and for bringing forward so many new arguments to the discussion.