In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of “human rights.” Liberal-individualist views of human rights and advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether human or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnerable to criticisms from the left which emphasize the importance of social relationships to individual well-being. Benton’s argument supports the important assumption, underpinning the cause for human rights, that humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm. Both liberal rights theory and its socialist critique fail adequately to theorize these aspects of human vulnerability. Nevertheless, it is argued that, enriched by feminist and ecological insights, a socialist view of rights has much to offer. Lucid and wide-ranging in its argument, Natural Relations enables the outline of an ecological socialist view of rights and justice to begin to take shape.

In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of "human rights." Liberal-individualist views of human rights and advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether human or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnerable to criticisms from the left which emphasize the importance of social relationships to individual well-being. Benton's argument supports the important assumption, underpinning the cause for human rights, that humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm. Both liberal rights theory and its socialist critique fail adequately to theorize these aspects of human vulnerability. Nevertheless, it is argued that, enriched by feminist and ecological insights, a socialist view of rights has much to offer. Lucid and wide-ranging in its argument, Natural Relations enables the outline of an ecological socialist view of rights and justice to begin to take shape.

Causation and Laws of Nature is a collection of articles which represents current research on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, mostly by authors working in or active in the Australasian region. The book provides an overview of current work on the theory of causation, including counterfactual, singularist, nomological and causal process approaches. It also covers work on the nature of laws of nature, with special emphasis on the scientific essentialist theory that laws of nature are, at base, the fundamental dispositions or capacities of natural kinds of things. Because the book represents a good cross-section of authors currently working on these themes in the Australasian region, it conveys something of the interest and excitement of an active philosophical debate between advocates of several different research programmes in the area.

"In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are then situated in current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science"--

This book proposes a new and systematic interpretation of the mental nature, function and structure, and importance of the imagination in Book 1, 'Of the Understanding', of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The proposed interpretation has deeply revisionary implications for Hume's philosophy of mind and for his naturalism, epistemology, and stance to scepticism. The book remedies a surprising blindspot in Hume scholarship and contributes to the current, lively philosophical debate on imagination. Hume's philosophy, if rightly understood, gives suggestions about how to treat imagination as a mental natural kind, its cognitive complexity and variety of functions notwithstanding. Hume's imagination is a faculty of inference and the source of a distinctive kind of idea, which complements our sensible representations of objects. Our cognitive nature, if restricted to the representation of objects and of their relations, would leave ordinary and philosophical cognition seriously underdetermined and expose us to scepticism. Only the non-representational, inferential faculty of the imagination can put in place and vindicate ideas like causation, body, and self, which support our cognitive practices. The book reconstructs how Hume's naturalist inferentialism about the imagination develops this fundamental insight. Its five parts deal with the dualism of representation and inference; the explanation of generality and modality; the production of causal ideas; the production of spatial and temporal content, and the distinction of an external world of bodies and an internal one of selves; and the replacement of the understanding with imagination in the analysis of cognition and in epistemology.

David K. Lewis (1941-2001) was unquestionably one of the most important analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, writing papers and books, largely but not exclusively in metaphysics, that set the intellectual agenda across a huge variety of topics in the last three decades. Some twenty years after his death, this collection of essays reflects the historical importance of Lewis's work by bringing together a range of scholarly reflections on his work. The essays consider a range of topics including the nature of metaphysics, the epistemology of necessary truths, possibility, naturalness, supervenience, time travel, causation, semantics, and ethics. Several of them draw on an exciting new body of material in the Lewisian corpus, his extensive correspondence, recently published in two volumes (OUP, 2020). The wide-ranging topics of these essays illustrate the impressive extent of Lewis's thought and his reach across most areas of analytic philosophy. The chapters collected in this volume adds to the increasing literature on the philosophy of David K. Lewis and will be an important book for those examining his role in the history of analytic philosophy.

Let $\mathcal A$ be a mathematical structure with an additional relation $R$. The author is interested in the degree spectrum of $R$, either among computable copies of $\mathcal A$ when $(\mathcal A,R)$ is a ``natural'' structure, or (to make this rigorous) among copies of $(\mathcal A,R)$ computable in a large degree d. He introduces the partial order of degree spectra on a cone and begin the study of these objects. Using a result of Harizanov--that, assuming an effectiveness condition on $\mathcal A$ and $R$, if $R$ is not intrinsically computable, then its degree spectrum contains all c.e. degrees--the author shows that there is a minimal non-trivial degree spectrum on a cone, consisting of the c.e. degrees.