Contemporary Debates Research Articles

Marx on Leisure: An Aristotelian Interpretation

Abstract Despite his influence on those interested by leisure, Marx's own conception of leisure is rarely discussed. Insofar as it is, he is generally either thought to see leisure as free time or as indistinct from necessary labour in communist society. In this article, I suggest that by reading Capital and the Grundrisse through an Aristotelian lens, we can find a third potential conception of leisure in Marx, which shares three features in common with Aristotle's. Leisure is distinct from free time simpliciter, it is a “state-condition” people are in when they perform ends in themselves, and it is constitutive of the final end. I conclude that adopting a conception of leisure grounded in this Marxian conception could have implications for contemporary debates around free time and the value of leisure goods like arts and culture.

Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom in Higher Education in England

ABSTRACT: This article considers the context, development, and significance of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 . The Act was relatively unusual in aiming to increase the normative strength of freedom of speech. The central justification given for the Act was the need to respond to an increasing number of interferences with free speech and academic freedom occurring at universities. The growth of a "cancel culture" was having a "chilling effect" on students, staff, and visiting speakers. The article examines a range of high-profile cases and incidents that have attracted political and media attention. Many of these have concerned contemporary debates related to trans issues and identity politics. The issues discussed in the article are of wider international interest. Similar controversies have been experienced in universities in other states. The article makes comparative reference to developments in the field in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The article examines the perceived issues and evidential bases for the Act, reviews the legal duties, and analyzes the key legal concepts. It considers these in terms of compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). It concludes by addressing three thematic issues: (i) a Model Code; (ii) challenging university ideologies; and (iii) securing cultural change.

Digitalization of corporate finance and firm performance: global evidence and analysis

Purpose As of now, the digitization of corporate finance presents a paradigm shift in business strategy, innovation, financing and managerial capability around the globe. However, the prevailing finance scholarly works hardly document the impact of the digitalization of corporate finance on firm performance with global evidence and analysis. Hence, the contemporary debate on whether firm performance is genuinely stimulated because of the digitalization of corporate finance or not has been a pressing issue in the relevant literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify a data-driven, concise response to an unaddressed finance issue if the performance of high-digitalized firms (HDFs) outperforms that of their counterpart peers for wealth maximization. Design/methodology/approach The first stage test models examine the firm performance of relatively high-digitalized firms as opposed to low-digitalized firms based on the system GMM. The second stage test of the probabilistic (logit) model infers that the probability of being HDFs explores because of better performance. Then, the authors execute robust checks based on the different quantile regressions and Z-score-based system GMM. In addition, the authors recheck and present the test results of the fixed effect and random effect to capture time-invariant individual heterogeneity. Finally, the supplementary test findings of firms’ credit strength by using Altman five- and four-factor Z-score models are presented. Findings By using cross-country panel analysis as 15 years’ test bed for HDFs and low digitalized firms (LDFs), the test results indicate that the overall firm performance of a digitalized firm is significantly better than that of a non-digitalized firm. The global evidence documents that HDFs are exposed to higher values and are financially more persistent as compared to their counterparts. The finding is remarkably concomitant across several possible subsample analysis, such as country–industry–size–period analysis. Practical implications This study can be remarkably effective in encouraging managers, policymakers and investors to acknowledge the need for adopting the required digitalization. Overall, this original study addresses a core research gap in the corporate finance literature and remarkably provides further direction to rethink the assumptions of firm digitalization on additive value and thereby identify optimal decisions for wealth maximization. The findings also imply that investors require an additional risk premium if they invest in relatively LDFs, which have relatively lower market value and weaker firm performance. Originality/value From an investors point of view, the academic novelty contributes to an innovative and unsettled issue on the impact of digitization of corporate finance on firm performance because there is a new question of high or low digitization of corporate finance in the global market. Hence, this academic novelty contributes to sharing global evidence of the digitalization of corporate finance and its effect on firm performances. In addition, an intensive critical review analysis is conducted based on the most recent and relevant scholarly works published in the top-tier journals of finance and business stream to fix the hypothesis. Overall, this study addresses a core research gap in the corporate finance literature; notably provides further direction to rethink firm digitalization; and thereby identifies optimal decisions for shareholders’ wealth maximization.

Theories and Methods of Consciousness

This work explores the ontological theories, and their methodologies, regarding the origins and nature of consciousness in the multiverse.  The paper critically assesses Mocombe’s consciousness field theory within the larger body of contemporary ontological debates, and their methodologies, regarding the nature, origin, and constitution of consciousness, especially human consciousness, in the world.   

Contemporary Censorship Debates in Germany

During the past five years the cultural world in Germany has been shaken and divided by a series of controversies involving contemporary works of art charged with being anti-Semitic. Obviously, with the Holocaust continuing to occupy a major position in modern German consciousness and history, sensitivity to anti-Semitic expressions is particularly keen here. This sensitivity has been increased by a number of recent developments, including the growing visibility of far-right political groups, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) protesting Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and the official politicization of these tensions by a parliamentary ruling in 2015 restricting the activities of the BDS. The conflict between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli state and legitimate censorship of ethnically offensive material has recently become increasingly bitter in Germany. This article discusses the dynamics of three of the most significant recent examples: the conflict involving Germany’s most prestigious arts festival, the Kassell documenta in 2020; the withdrawal in 2022 of the European Drama Award, the continent’s largest award, from British dramatist Caryl Churchill; and the withdrawal from the Munich stage of the most recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, who has been widely heralded in Germany as the most significant contemporary dramatist.

Railroad Luxemburg: Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Infrastructure and its Consequences for a Public Service Internet

Infrastructures of circulation, transportation, and communication play a central role in Luxemburg’s work in political economy as well as revolutionary strategy. This paper seeks to reconstruct and develop a theory of capitalist infrastructural expansion drawing from a variety of Luxemburg’s writings. In Accumulation of Capital, infrastructural expansion – namely of railroads – plays a central role at all stages of capitalist accumulation. Railroads act as a site of military and state investment for introducing the commodity economy to non-capitalist sectors and eventually for the “capitalist emancipation of the hinterland.” At the same time Luxemburg rejects the progressive character of these infrastructural endeavours, and she argues that they will not be a genuine “stamp of progress in an historical sense” until capitalism has been destroyed. It is no coincidence then that her political writings prominently feature figures such as railway and postal workers, who are strategically positioned to strike at the infrastructures of imperialism. A Luxemburgist theory of infrastructure has important relevance for contemporary debates around the expansion and ownership of Internet infrastructures. The past decade has been marked by various calls for new models of Internet ownership. These include The Public Service Internet Manifesto, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Internet for All Campaign, Tarnoff’s Internet for the People, Téwodros Workneh’s “Case for Telecommunications Commons in Ethiopia,” and netCommons Project’s vision for community networks. Such calls for a publicly owned and funded Internet risk reproducing some of the dynamics Luxemburg describes in her account of the history of railroads, canals, telegraphs etc. Namely, such calls parallel the state subsidising of an infrastructure that seeks out new sites of accumulation and extraction. This is not to say that such endeavours should be wholly abandoned, but must fit into a broader anti-capitalist political program, otherwise such infrastructural expansion can be seen as continuing the expansion of capitalist accumulation. Luxemburg deters us from looking for a technical fix. For this reason, Luxemburg’s political writings and her critique of the non-progressive nature of capitalism are also useful as she indicates how the destruction of capitalism can alter and redeem such large infrastructural projects.

Demarcating the granular frontier: planetary urbanization without an inside

ABSTRACT In its age of global crisis, sand has acquired a conspicuous profile as an urban resource and undercover vector of statecraft. Amidst mounting reports of the disastrous effects of sand mining stoked by intense cycles of urbanization and territorial expansion across the world, it is critical to understand the formation of sand’s granular frontiers, and how their differentiated expression through the global sand crisis demands a reconsideration of the theoretical frontiers of urbanization, territory, and global trade. Building on conceptualisations of sand’s granular geographies and its “geologising” of urban political ecology, this paper seeks to demarcate the theoretical and empirical terrain of sand’s granular frontiers, and how they problematize contemporary debates around urbanization’s “planetary” scope and its extractive underbelly. By reconnecting the frontiers of sand extraction and urbanization, this article theorizes the enclosure of geomorphology and where sand’s satiation of urban and state development is leading. In examining how sand’s simultaneous exclusion from formal processes of valuation and regulation structures urbanization in unpredictable ways, it seeks to provide an account of planetary urbanization without an inside.

I, You, and We: Beyond Individualism and Collectivism

ABSTRACT The contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted several decades, but questions concerning the nature of ‘we’ and the relation between the individual and the community are obviously far older. We can find a particularly rich discussion in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of intentionality a few years later. A distinctive feature of the phenomenological contribution was its exploration of the relation between the first- and second-person singular and the first-person plural perspectives. How are I, you, and we intertwined? The aim of this paper is to present some core insights from this early debate.

Priests and their Bodies after Trent: (Dis)abilities, Masculinities, Sexualities

This article discusses the impact of a “corporeal turn” in early modern religious history on recent publications in Counter‐Reformation Catholic History. Scholars increasingly look towards the Church's legal archives in Rome as a source of information about ecclesiastical and theological attitudes to the body and sexuality. The figure of the priest has emerged as one of the most interesting subjects in that inquiry because of the richness of material about clerics which those archives hold. Scholars are now engaged in study of how past generations of theologians, ecclesiastical magistrates, and medics assessed priestly abilities and disabilities, priests' engagement in sexual acts, and their wider performances of masculine identities. Rome's role as a major centre in shaping Catholic masculinities is reinforced in this scholarship but a new study underscores the blurred boundaries between the lay and ecclesiastical in masculinities there. Overall, this research provides much new material both for rethinking historical questions about Trent's impact on reform discourses and also for commenting on contemporary debates in theology and Church politics about the nature of Christian priesthood.

‘Valuable Lives to Save’ vs. ‘Babysitting These People While They Try to Kill Themselves’: Changing Police Attitudes Towards Safe Consumption Sites

Abstract North American police responses to the ‘drug issue’ have long been shaped by a crime control rather than a harm reduction imperative. Consequently, police officers’ responses to safe consumption sites (SCSs), where people who use illicit drugs can reduce personal health risks by administering previously obtained drugs in the presence of trained staff, were initially hostile. This paper draws on interview data from police officers in two western Canadian cities to highlight an apparent softening in attitudes, perhaps due to the current fentanyl-driven drug poisoning crisis. While some officers clearly recognized their public health benefits, others accepted SCSs, acknowledging the futility of a continued ‘war on drugs’. Some voiced reservations about SCSs, but not because of a generic ‘drugs are bad’ sentiment. Rather, they worried about specific downstream implications for communities and police work. These findings, reflecting apparent changes in police officers’ responses to SCSs, are discussed in the context of contemporary debates about police culture and the possibilities and desirability of pursuing police reform.

Libertarianism without alternative possibilities

AbstractIn the contemporary debate on free will, most philosophers assume that the defense of libertarianism implies the defense of the notion of alternative possibilities. This article discusses this presupposition by showing that it is possible to build a libertarianism without alternative possibilities, apparently more robust than libertarianism with alternative possibilities. Inspired by Bergson, this nonclassical libertarianism challenges the idea that all causation implies the actualization of a predetermined possibility (an idea shared by determinism and classical libertarianism). Moreover, it challenges the idea that free will is a mere choice between prefixed possibilities: for this libertarianism, free will is the result of a creative process of the mind—an entirely causal process whose outcome is not, however, predetermined. This nonclassical libertarianism describes the process of forming a will in a more realistic way than classical libertarianism does. Furthermore, it is not threatened by the problem of chance.

The right to science or to Wissenschaft? Five lessons from the travaux préparatoires

This article identifies novel insights from a detailed analysis of the travaux préparatoires of the right to science provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It makes five main contributions. First, it demonstrates the bidirectional influence between the UDHR and the earlier American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man in the formulation of the right to science, as opposed to unidirectional borrowing. Second, it traces the origins of Article 15 ICESCR to the UNESCO Constitution and argues that Article 15, specifically subclauses 2–4, were intended as implementation measures, though Article 15(3) was elevated into a separate and additional obligation due to its perceived importance for scientific and creative progress. Third, it clarifies an apparent conflict between drafting history and subsequent instruments concerning scientific purpose by distinguishing the development and use of science. Fourth, it suggests facilitating the search for truth as an unarticulated object and purpose of these provisions. Finally, it shows that many drafters acknowledged a broad scope of ‘science’ beyond the natural sciences. Overall, this article elucidates overlooked aspects of the travaux to inform contemporary debates on this important yet obscure right.

Global Power Shifts and the Cotton Subsidy Problem: How Emerging Powers Became the New Kings of Cotton Subsidies

Abstract Cotton is one of the most contentious issues in the global trading system. Subsidies provided by richer countries have had a devastating impact on the welfare of poor cotton farmers in the developing world. Cotton subsidies have long been seen as a symbol of the injustices of the trading system—a harm perpetrated by the rich countries of the Global North against the poor countries of the Global South. This conception of the global cotton subsidy problem is deeply entrenched and has profoundly shaped contemporary debates about power and fairness in the multilateral trading system. As this article shows, however, the prevailing view of the global cotton subsidy problem is now simply outdated and inaccurate. Today, the biggest providers of cotton subsidies are no longer the United States and EU but emerging economic powers like China and India. These major developing countries are providing large volume of subsidies, which are distorting global production and trade, and harming some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable farmers in other developing countries. The cotton subsidy problem is no longer simply a North–South issue. Addressing the problem requires tackling all harmful subsidies, including those from large emerging economies.

Phantoms in and of the Archive: Mary Cudmore’s Encounters with a Ghost in Cork in 1688 and 1689

Abstract In October 1688, and again in May 1689, Mary Cudmore claimed to have encountered a ‘spectre’ in her employers’ house in Cork city. The great interest the story aroused among the townspeople is indicated in letters from prominent inhabitants and an examination of Mary by the bishop of Cork and Ross. They allow us access into the homes and heads of the people of Cork at a point when significant challenges were being mounted to the Protestant authorities’ dominance of the city, as the War of the Two Kings loomed, and as memories of other conflicts stirred. As observers weighed questions of scruple and certainty, and balanced concerns about imposture and creditworthiness, we also glimpse shifts in supernatural belief and contemporary debates about the construction of proof and truth. That anything of Mary’s experiences has survived is remarkable, given the loss of most of the contents of the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922. In the context of ongoing deliberate and negligent destruction of archives, this article thus also argues for consideration of and consideration to partial and phantom histories.

Islamic Multiplicities in Kashmir: Debates about the Food Practices of a XVIth-Century Sufi Saint and the Modern Cult

Abstract The spread of Islam to the South Asian region of Kashmir and its role in shaping the socio-religious and political contours in the region is a highly charged debate in academic as well as popular circles. This article examines the early modern debates about the vegetarian food practices of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint of Kashmir, Baba Hyder Rishi (b. 1504) and contemporary debates around the modern cult mainly centered around his shrine in the Anantnag (locally known as Islamabad) town of south Kashmir. It is divided into two parts; the first focuses on debates during the saint’s own lifetime and the second analyses modern debates about what has by now emerged as a cult around the saint’s shrine. We begin with a critical re-evaluation of the wide-spread notion that the saint’s practice of vegetarianism was, much like his predecessors in the local Rīshī Sufi order, grounded in local Buddhist-Hindu customs and thus exemplifies the syncretic nature of Islam in Kashmir. Instead, we argue that both the defence and contestation of the saint’s practice as well its modern cult was and continues to be located within the Islamic tradition itself. We use this discussion for a critical reflection on the widely prevalent idea of religious syncretism in Kashmir and the over-simplified and ahistorical view of Islam as a monolith, and then explore the possibility of using Islamic ‘multiplicity’ as an alternate analytical category.

Epistemic Authorities and Skilled Agents: A Pluralist Account of Moral Expertise

AbstractThis paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the discussion about moral expertise.

Does God Intervene in Our Lives? Special Divine Action in Aquinas

Does God intervene in our lives? In this paper, I respond “yes” and work out a Thomistic account of special divine action in human life. I argue that God intensifies His action in moments that are particularly significant for our salvation. In such moments, God intervenes in a contingent mode and reorients our lives for the sake of our final good. First, I present Aquinas’ terminological choice of specialis and intervenire and address concerns expressed in the contemporary divine action debate against the term “intervention”. Second, I discuss the special divine action as a subtype of the special providence that rules over human beings. The special providence mirrors the special place of humans in the created order on account of their reason and freedom. Third, I show that divine interventions occur through irregular contingency. I refer to several interventions: test, habitual grace, God’s moving of the will, God’s enlightenment of the intellect, and punishment. Since it occurs contingently, the special divine action can be known through interpreting signs (a kind of conjectural knowledge). Fourth, I show that not all contingencies are divine interventions. To differentiate between them, I introduce an orientational criterion of interpretation: the transfiguration of a person’s life toward her final good.

Developing a Critical Response to Ad Hominem Attacks Against Climate Science

Ad hominem attacks against climate scientists—including personal attacks questioning an individual’s character, competence, or motives—remain the most common type of contrarian strategy found in contemporary climate debates. Despite their pervasiveness, climate-related ad hominem argumentation remains understudied by scholars in both the humanities and social sciences. This study adapts Douglas Walton’s critical framework for identifying ad hominem attacks against the climate community and evaluating them for rhetorical errors by analyzing developing critical responses. This article offers guidance for future inoculation interventions, including media literacy campaigns that raise awareness and understanding of ad hominem attacks used by contrarian organizations in misinformation campaigns targeting climate science.

Why Americans Support Strict Counterterrorism Measures: Examining the Relationship between Concern about Terrorism and Public Support for Counterterrorism

Abstract After 9/11, contemporary debates on security often place civil liberties and security at opposite ends of the same spectrum, requiring the loss of one for the maintenance of the other. In addition, public concerns about terrorism determine or at least color public perception about government counterterrorism activities. Thus, the current study empirically examines factors influencing the public’s perception of government activities that may infringe upon individual rights, focusing on the effects of concern about terrorism. For this study we use data collected in World Value Survey (WVS) pertaining to respondents from the U.S. The results of a series of regression analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicate that public concern about terrorism is positively associated with support for counterterrorism activities. Moreover, other factors including satisfaction with democracy, community membership and trust in the government are found to play an important role in explaining public support for counterterrorism activities.

Experiment-driven rationalism

Philosophers debate about which logical system, if any, is the One True Logic. This involves a disagreement concerning the sufficient conditions that may single out the correct logic among various candidates. This paper discusses whether there are necessary conditions for the correct logic; that is, I discuss whether there are features such that if a logic is correct, then it has those features, although having them might not be sufficient to single out the correct logic. Traditional rationalist arguments suggest that the necessary conditions of thought are necessary and sufficient conditions singling out the correct logical and mathematical theories. In the contemporary debate, Chalmers advocates a view along this line. Jago, analogously, suggests that the necessary conditions for thought—or, as he calls them, our basic epistemic expectations—single out a family of logical and mathematical theories. Warren and Williamson, on the other hand, argue that there are no necessary conditions of thought. I argue that there are necessary conditions for thought, and these are necessary but not sufficient conditions to be the correct logic; indeed, these are features that all logics—correct or incorrect—share. No view we can understand is ruled out by the necessary conditions for thought, but we cannot understand quite any view. Human linguistic and conceptual abilities are genetically constrained, and these constraints are our best guide to the boundaries of logic. Arguing for this, I tackle two dogmas of modern rationalism: namely, the view that the biological constraints of human cognition have no bearing on the boundaries of the epistemic space, and the view that the boundaries of thought coincide with the boundaries of language.