Many supporters of open borders argue that restrictions on immigration are unjust in part because they undermine equal opportunity. Borders prevent the globally least-advantaged from pursuing desirable opportunities abroad, cementing arbitrary facts about birth and citizenship. In this paper I advance an argument from equal opportunity to global freedom of movement. In addition to preventing people from pursuing desirable opportunities, borders also create a prone, segregated population that can be dominated and exploited. Restrictions on mobility do not just trap people in bad opportunity sets—they help create bad opportunities by isolating the negative externalities of production and foreign policy. Freedom of movement can play a vital role in spreading risks and burdens, incentivizing their mitigation. Using an analysis of feudalism, segregation, and the transnational economy, I illustrate the centrality of space and mobility, showing why freedom of movement is a necessary tool for preventing political and economic oppression.

Regardless of British colonial motives, many Indians migrated against caste/casteism across Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. British Guiana marked the entry of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean in 1838. Paradoxically, thereafter religious and caste identities have risen among them. This article aims to unravel the intersectionality of religion, caste, and gender in the Caribbean Indian diaspora. Based on the recent field study in Guyana and Suriname as well as from the interdisciplinary sources, this essay examines: how brahminical deities, temples, and patriarchal institutions have re-invented caste-based asymmetrical sociality in the plantation colonies. Contrary to such re-establishment of brahminical inequalities, it argues, the castefree Indo-Guyanese religio-cultural practices foster inter-religious and inter-racial inclusive integration. And that this has led to self-transformation as well as in the making of a casteless society in the Caribbean.

While Spain was conquering new lands in the Americas, foreigners arrived into their own—the Gitanos. Spain imposed a double-standard whereby their crossing into new, occupied, territory was legitimate, but the entry of others into Spanish territory was not. I compare and contrast these historically parallel movements of people using Deleuze and Guattari’s taxonomy of movement (what they refer to as nomadology). I conclude that the double-standard of movement was due to differences of power between these two groups, understood in terms of material conditions, a prototypical “racial contract,” and differences in the relationship to land and space. This history and analysis of colonial Spain is a critical start for Latin American postcolonial theory; it gives us a framework to study philosophies of migration and nomadism; and finally, it introduces the Gitanos (and Roma in general) as an important population to complicate critical race theory or theories of ethnicity.

In this paper, I defend an unconventional mereological framework involving the doctrine of divine simplicity, to surmount a significant yet neglected dilemma resulting from that long-standing view of God as absolutely, and uniquely, simple. This framework establishes God as literally a part of everything—an “omni-part.” Although consequential for the many prominent religious traditions featuring divine simplicity, my analysis focuses on potential implications for an important formative issue in medieval Islamic philosophy. This problem of principality, with regards to metaphysical primacy and importance, derives from Ibn Sīnā’s celebrated distinction between essence and existence, and involves determining which is genuinely, objectively, real. Instead of supporting the historically dominant opposing viewpoints advancing either the principality of existence or of essence (aṣālat al-wujūd/al-māhiyya), I claim that God as omni-part aids renewed defence of the majority rejected view which upholds the combined principality of existence and essence together. Additionally, my proposal reinforces various theological desiderata including divine omnipresence and God’s necessity across possible worlds, while also supporting new perspectives on Ibn ‘Arabi’s influential notion of waḥdat al-wūjūd, understood as the absolute unity of being.

Philosophers and theologians have traditionally been impressed with arguments which purport to show that predicates such as ‘wise,’ ‘good,’ and ‘powerful’ cannot, when applied to God, mean what they ordinarily mean when applied to everyday creatures. Theological predications, according to these arguments, cannot be univocal with ordinary predications. Philosophers in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions presented accounts of how non-univocal theological predications could be true of God. These are commonly known as analogical and apophatic accounts of the divine predicates. In this paper, I argue that representatives from each tradition also took epistemological constraints on an account of theological predication seriously. That is, they took it to be important to show not only how a predicate could be true of God, but also how we could know that it is true. Epistemological constraints of this kind, I argue, are non-trivial, since many accounts of the truth of theological predications entail that it is impossible or difficult to know them. Moreover, epistemological constraints are also important for ongoing discussions of theological predication, as they are violated by several contemporary accounts in the literature.

What can we learn about the existence of non-physical entities (or a particular non-physical entity) from close inquiry into special kinds of experiences? Contemporary analytic philosophy has sometimes studied mystic experiences as evidence for the existence of such entities (for example, see: Broad 1939; Swinburne 2004; Plantinga 1981; Alston 1991). The article is organized as follows: first, I discuss several distinctions that seem to me to play substantive roles in philosophizing about such experiences. I will then offer and criticize two arguments that support the significance of the experiences. The arguments do not show whether a non-physical entity does or does not exist; they highlight a philosophical (and not theological) framework that can be beneficial to a variety of different approaches. Based on a heuristic strategy, the arguments will focus on the possibility/impossibility of objective representation of non-physical entities. They invite the reader (opponent, proponent, or neutral) to reflect on deeper philosophical grounds necessary for evaluating any positive or negative claims about the significance/insignificance of such experiences. The first argument rests on contemporary theories and assumptions. The second argument will use notions that drive from Classic Arabic-Persian Philosophy.

In Abrahamic theism scripture is essential to belief-forming, yet scripture as an epistemic evidence source is plagued with difficulties. In the following article, I argue for a specific reductionist model of scriptural proposition justification utilising an account of scripture as testimony. I contend that for an individual to be justified in a belief sourced from a scriptural proposition, she must appeal to external evidence to “prop up her epistemic bar.” Accordingly, I consider some potential “epistemic bar-proppers.”

The destruction and pollution of the natural environment poses two problems for philosophers. The first is political and pragmatic: which theory of the environment is best equipped to impact policymakers heading as we are toward a series of potential ecocatastrophes? The second is more central: On the environment philosophers tend to fall either side of an irreconcilable divide. Either our moral concerns are grounded directly in nature, or the appeal is made via an anthropocentric set of interests. The lack of a common ground is disturbing. In this paper I attempt to diagnose the reason for this lack. I shall agree that wild nature lacks features of intrinsic moral worth, and that leaves a puzzle: Why is it once we subtract the fact that there is such a lack, we are left with strong intuitions against the destruction and/or pollution of wild nature? Such intuitions can be grounded only in a strong sense of aesthetic concern combined with a common-sense regard for the interests of sentient life as it is indirectly affected by the quality of the environment. I suggest also that of the positions on offer, a hybrid theory of the environment is best suited to address our first problem, that of having an effective influence in the polity.

The human-centred notion of the “instrumental value of nature” and the eco-centred notion of the “intrinsic value of nature” both fail to provide satisfactory grounds for the preservation of wild nature. This paper seeks to identify some reasons for that failure and to suggest that the structure - though not the content - of the “aesthetic value” approach is the most promising alternative, though the notion of “the aesthetic value of nature”, as usually employed, also fails to capture the real motivation for such preservation. I argue that these problems arise because humans are, for good reasons, deeply ambivalent about their relation to nature. This ambivalence is explained in a Nietzschean context and I argue that an understanding of this ambivalence can be used to develop and illustrate a fuller and richer understanding of what we mean by “the value of nature” which does provide grounds for the preservation of wild nature.

The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories.