Volume 34, Issue 2

This essay examines a new way to exercise democratic control over the market. Instead of a democratic government interfering with a market's outcomes (e.g. via taxes or minimum wages), we may also "democratize" the market by requiring that all relevant group agents who participate in that market (notably: firms) be democratically governed. This is what I call an agent-democratic market. The purpose of this essay is to argue for the claim that agent-democratic markets are a normatively viable way to democratize the market - and potentially constitute a genuine alternative to the standard approach of subjecting market outcomes to democratic control

In this paper, I argue that Steadfast Views of peer disagreement - a family of views according to which standing firm in the face of peer disagreement can be rationally permissible are incoherent. First, I articulate two constraints that any Steadfast Views of disagreement should endorse: (i) Steadfastness's Core (ii) The Deference Principle. I show that (i) and (ii) are inconsistent: they cannot both be true. My argument, briefly put, is that one cannot rationally treat one's peer's opinion as unconditionally relevant to a hypothesis, H, but conditional on the supposition of a disagreement, irrelevant to H. Because Steadfast Views endorse a set of mutually inconsistent propositions, I conclude that Steadfast Views are incoherent

Few philosophers today embrace quantitative hedonism, which states that a person's well-being depends only on the amount of her experienced happiness and suffering. Despite recent attempts to rehabilitate it, most philosophers still consider it untenable. The most influential arguments levelled against it by Mill, Moore, Nozick and Kagan purport to demonstrate that well-being must depend on more than only the amount of experienced happiness and suffering. I argue in this paper that quantitative hedonism can rebut these arguments by pointing out a shared systematic aw in their argumentative structure. In particular, I argue that they are based on thought experiments that invoke either structurally unreliable intuitions or intuitions that are not in tension to the tenets of quantitative hedonism. While this does not rehabilitate the theory by itself, it shows that the classical arguments against quantitative hedonism provide less evidence against it than commonly thought and certainly do not conclusively prove it wrong

Hornsby and Langton (H&L), put forward the idea of silencing as an "illocutionary disablement". Appealing to Austin's speech act theory, they situate silencing as opposite to speech act and argue that when there is silencing, people's illocutionary act fails and their right to free speech is violated. This paper presents a defence of H&L's account of silencing, against objections raised by Ishani Maitra (2009). Maitra questions the model of illocutionary silencing by arguing that Austin's illocutionary model is inaccurate and vague hence, not useful for the discussions of silencing. In response, I argue that Maitra's understanding of the perlocutionary act is misguided and requires a critical examination. Maitra discusses the notion of the perlocutionary act as the goals that the speaker achieves by securing the uptake. I oppose such a view by arguing that securing the uptake does not ensure the performance of a perlocutionary act

Naturgesetze spielen eine zentrale Rolle in der Wissenschaftstheorie. Traditionell fokussierten Wissenschaftstheoretiker auf (Fundamental-)Gesetze der Physik, die man als zumindest wahre, universell gültige und kontrafaktische Konditionale stützende Aussagen ansah. Wiewohl diese Behauptung üuber Gesetze für den Bereich der Physik wohl zutre_en mag, scheinen doch die Gesetze in den Spezialwissenschaften andere Charakteristika aufzuweisen. Von ihnen wird behauptet, sie hätten Ausnahmen, seien also Ceteris-Paribus-Gesetze. Den Ausführungen von Peter Lipton in seinem Artikel "All Else Being Equal" folgend wird eine zweiteilige Forschungsfrage er örtert: Existieren genuine Ceteris-Paribus-Gesetze und, wenn ja, was ist darunter genau zu verstehen? Der Beitrag dieser Arbeit liegt insofern in einer kritischen Würdigung von Liptons Vorschlag als auch in seiner anschließenden Einordnung begrüundet