The concept of hospitality has seen a strong revival in the literature on migration and among pro-migrant activists. However, its meaning, its scope, and the nature of the obligations it imposes remain contested. Open-border advocates see hospitality as a moral principle of openness that should trump nationalist arguments for closure, while nationalists tap into the home analogy and compare the state to a household welcoming migrants as guests, whose stay should accordingly be temporary and marked by gratitude. Some consider hospitality a virtue that should translate into a personal responsibility to open one’s doors to others, while some politicise the concept to apply it to borders and state duties towards migrants. This paper unpacks the various literal and metaphorical meanings of the age-old concept of hospitality, and the shortcomings of its rhetorical uses. It then argues for a conception of hospitality as a principle of care towards displaced people. Hospitality alleviates ordinary obstacles that prevent a functional life in a new environment and allows for home-making practices. It is triggered by the vulnerability created by displacement, i.e., the material, emotional and political harms resulting from the loss of a home.

In this essay I explore how travel and border-crossing for abortion care constitutes a challenge to methodological nationalism, which serves to obscure such experiences from view. Drawing up field research conducted at two abortion clinics in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I also explore some implications of regarding pregnant people who travel for abortion care as a type of migrant, even (but not necessarily) if they are U.S. citizens and legal residents. Finally, I assess how this discursive shift can make important contributions to pandemic and migration ethics.

An increasingly wide array of moral arguments has coalesced in recent work on the question of how to confront the phenomenon of climate change driven displacement. Despite invoking a range of disparate moral principles, arguments addressing displacement across international borders seem to converge on a similar range of policy remedies: expansion of the 1951 Refugee Convention to include ecological refugees, expedited immigration (whether individual or collective), or, for entire political communities that have suffered displacement, even the ceding of sovereign territory. Curiously, this convergence is observable even across the distinction of interest for this paper: the distinction between arguments that proceed in the vein of reparations and arguments that reach their conclusion without invoking any reparations. Even though as a collection they appear to point in the same direction, I argue that non-reparative arguments that seek to address climate change driven displacement have several shortcomings, such that climate justice should be understood to include an indispensable role for reparations.

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.

There is no consensus about appropriate philosophical method that can be relied on to settle philosophical questions and instead of established findings, there are multiple conflicting arguments and positions, and widespread disagreement and debate. Given this feature of philosophy, it might seem that philosophy has proven to be a worthless endeavour, with no possibility of philosophical progress. The challenge then is to develop a conception of philosophy that reconciles the lack of general or lasting agreement with the possibility of philosophical progress. I present such a conception in this paper. I argue that the aim of philosophy is to resolve philosophical problems, which is different from establishing settled and final answers or positions. Philosophical problems involve inadequate or incongruous conceptions that cannot be settled once and for all but can be resolved by transforming our conceptions so they are now congruous and adequate. There is philosophical progress every time a warranted, defensible position is developed that resolves a philosophical problem, even if there are competing resolutions and further problems to resolve, as there always are in philosophy.

Philosophical concerns are evidenced from the beginning of human literature, which have no obvious connection to philosophy’s mainstream epistemological and metaphysical problematic. I reject the views that the nature of philosophy is a philosophical question, and that the discipline is united by methodology, arguing that it must be united by subject matter. The origins of the discipline provide reasons to doubt the existence of a unifying subject matter, however, and scepticism about philosophy also arises from its a priori methodology and apparent lack of progress. In response, I argue that philosophy acquired a distinctive subject matter when the concept of transcendence was introduced into attempts to gain a systematic understanding of the world and our place within it; philosophy thereby pursues the same aim of achieving a synoptic vision of reality as religion, but resembles science in its development and employment of rigorous methodologies. Philosophy’s subject matter explains why it must be pursued a priori, and it only appears not to have progressed when aims are neglected, and it is inappropriately assimilated to science.

Ever since Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, most philosophers have taken the distinction between science and philosophy to depend upon the existence of a class of truths especially amenable to philosophical investigation. In recent times, Quine’s arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction have cast doubt over the existence of such a class of special philosophical truths and consequently many now doubt that there is a sharp distinction between science and philosophy. In this paper, I present a perfectly sharp distinction between science and philosophy that does not depend upon any distinction between philosophical and scientific truths.

Philosophy certainly has connections with science but it is not itself a science. Nor is it literature. But it is related to literature in a way that excessive emphasis on science can obscure. In this paper I defend the rather old-fashioned view that philosophy is essentially linguistic. I also argue, less conventionally, that there is an unavoidable personal aspect to at least some philosophical problems, and in answering them we must speak for ourselves without being able to count on every other speaker of our language agreeing with us or even understanding what we say. Where the rules of our language are not set we must, so to speak, make them up for ourselves as we go. In this way philosophy requires the kind of linguistic creativity more often associated with poetical kinds of literature. Drawing on the work of Cora Diamond and Alice Crary, I argue that philosophy should be regarded as, not identical with, but continuous with poetry.

There exist two equally prominent, though seemingly divergent metaphilosophical viewpoints. One takes philosophy to be an essentially revolutionary process. The other sees philosophy as a constructive, collaborative enterprise that seeks increased rigor and consensus. Recent debate in the philosophy of language regarding the relationship of particular languages to the general capacity for language reveals an illuminating structural analogy with these divergent metaphilosophical trends. While neither debate is settled herein, regardless of their eventual determinations, it is concluded that there is little reason to suppose that philosophy will some day become a science, at least not in any metaphilosophically meaningful sense of the phrase.

Scientists often reach provisional agreement solutions to problems central to their disciplines, whereas philosophers do not. Although philosophy has been practiced by outstanding intellects for over two thousand years, philosophers have not reached agreement, provisional or otherwise, on the solution or dissolution of any central philosophical problem by philosophical methods. What about philosophy’s future? Until about 1970, philosophers were generally optimistic. Some pinned their hopes on revolution in methodology, others on reform of practice. The case for gradual reform still finds articulate advocates in philosophers like Michael Dummett and Timothy Williamson, but many philosophers today suspect that perennial disagreement may be inescapable. I consider three explanations for the inescapability of perennial disagreement—Richard Rorty’s relativism, Colin McGinn’s skepticism, and Nicholas Rescher’s pluralism—and find each wanting. I argue that a better explanation is the resistance of philosophers to commit, as scientists do, to formulating testable theories and collecting data to help decide between competing theories. I close by proposing that experimental philosophy, a movement still in its infancy, holds the promise of reuniting philosophy with science and moving philosophers closer to agreement on the solution of its central problems.

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy’s inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy’s future.

Contemporary metaphilosophical debates on the future of philosophy invariably include references to the natural sciences. This is wholly understandable given the cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences and their contributions to philosophical thought and practice. However such appeals to the sciences should be moderated by reflections on contingency of sciences. Using the work of contemporary historians and philosophers of science, I argue that an awareness of the radical contingency of science supports the claim that philosophy’s future should not be construed as either dependent or necessarily related to that of the sciences. Therefore contemporary debates – about the possibility of philosophy’s status as a science, say – should be tempered by an appreciation of the fact that science may cease to be a significant feature of future metaphilosophical debates. I conclude by considering the implications of this claim for assessments of the progressiveness of philosophy.

Democracy is rule of the people, but this tells us little, and lack of conceptual clarity creates confusion and undermines productive discussion. This paper explores four dimensions of democracy, articulating ways we can think about and apply the concept. The first concerns who we mean by the people, and here a state is more democratic when its body-politic is more inclusive. The other three concern what it means for the people to rule, and pertain to the theoretical principle of democracy, sovereign structures that are democratic, and actual democratic practice within a state. Distinguishing the dimensions is important because states can be more or less democratic along different dimensions. Thinking in terms of the dimensions of democracy enables more precise and productive debate on democratic government. Moreover, it reveals ways that democracy may change and evolve in the 21st century.

What follows considers whether harnessing word (argument) and action (occupation) constitutes a transformative democratic performance. In this, I am not seeking to replace the Aristotelian concept of performance, nor its transformative aspect, but I do ask how appropriate it is to confine mimetic acts of protest to an Aristotelian dialectic. The “efficacy debate” is a central issue for practitioners and scholars of political performance and I shall not question the truth of such claims that to be a performance the event must transform its audience in some way. Rather, I question, as others haveii, the ability for the performance of protest to effect any kind of political change. My argument is that Occupy’s politics emerge out of its performance of rhetorical devices and strategies that put democracy on display.

The paper considers the democratic value of the recent public sphere movements—from Occupy Wall Street to Taksim Gezi Park, from Tahrir Square to Sofia. It argues that the mainstream models of democracy fail to grasp the significance of these movements and the emergent political forms within these movements due to their narrow account of politics and democracy. To fully grasp the democratic value of recent public sphere movements, we should approach them from an agonistic perspective. Once democratic politics is viewed from an agonistic perspective, it becomes possible to recognize that while expressing their critique of existing liberal democratic institutions, the recent public sphere movements contested the dominant understanding of democracy and staged an alternative vision of democracy, democratic culture, and new forms of citizenship.