Ram Manikkalingam (Dialogue Advisory Group & University of Amsterdam), "Promoting Peace and Protecting Rights: How are Human Rights Good and Bad for Resolving Conflict?"
Activity
National and international actors seek to protect human rights and resolve conflict to improve conditions for civilians in internal conflict. Practical efforts to protect human rights can be good for resolving conflict by advancing long term stability, identifying causes of conflict,…
Raamy Majeed (Sydney): Conditional Concepts & Conceiving On the Tea Balcony
Other
Abstract: According to the conditional analysis of phenomenal concepts, these concepts are conditional in the sense that what they pick out depends on what exists in the actual world. If there are nonphysical states of the relevant sort in the actual world, our phenomenal concepts must pick out…
Kim Sterelny (ANU), "The Social Contract in a Complex World"
Other
Humans differ from other great apes in many ways, but one crucial difference is that our social worlds are vastly more co-operative than those of any other great ape. In my view, we now have a good conceptual model of the origins of human co-operation and it stability in the Pleistocene. But…
Katalin Balog (Rutgers): "Acquaintance and the Mind-Body Problem"
Other
In this paper I begin to develop an account of the acquaintance that each of us has with our own conscious states and processes. The account is a speculative proposal about human mental architecture and specifically about the nature of the concepts via which we think in first personish ways about…
Jonathan Herington (ANU), "Security and Essential Contestability"
Activity
There is a consensus with political science and law that ‘security’ is an essentially contested concept. This consensus is based upon the diversity of accounts (such as national security, human security, ontological security etc.) which are all said to compete over the proper definition of ‘…
Edward Elliott (ANU): What's Wrong With What the Racist Says?
Other
Abstract: What’s wrong with racist terms and other “defective” thick concepts? Answers to this question have been important in some recent discussions on conceptual role semantics (CRS) and the notion of epistemic analyticity. It has been argued that either CRS does not have the resources to…
Christian Barry (ANU), On Failing in One's Duties to Assist
Other
Duties to address severe deprivation based on being able to assist at some cost—assistance-based duties—are commonly thought (correctly, it is assumed in this paper) to be much less stringent than duties to address severe deprivation based on having contributed to its occurrence—contribution-based…