Brolly

Should Atrocious Speech Be Legally Protected?

Jill Hernandez — 2025-09-15

Some countries limit speech that is likely to incite hate-motivated violence upon a group or breach public peace. Internationally, political tension subsists between free speech advocates and those who want to regulate “hate speech”. In countries without prohibitions against hate speech, efforts to limit harm from public speech acts falls to private actors, who feel pressure either to adopt policies to create safe spaces or to allow all speech. This paper refocuses the debate and argues that the current tension between legal regulations of hate speech and cancel culture antagonists misses an entire genre of speech acts that the law should protect its citizens against-- atrocious speech, which yields atrocious harm. The Atrocity Paradigm, the non-ideal ethical theory defended by Claudia Card and others, contends that ethics and legal theory should be dedicated to prevent the worst sorts of harms, atrocities. Speech acts which predictably lead to inexcusable, intolerable harm can be distinguished from those which predictably lead to ordinary, or even, hateful wrongdoing. Focusing on atrocious speech allows for legal protections cantered on transmutative harm and inexcusability, and preserves public good obligations to preserve the existence and dignity of oppressed people groups.

Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Dyslexia

Yihe Liang — 2025-10-18

Dyslexia is a disorder/condition characterised by challenges in learning to read. It is usually considered to have a universal biological basis. However, this view was challenged by comparing areas of brain activity in Chinese and English dyslexia through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Siok et al. 2004, 71). This paper explores the differences in dyslexia performance between different language systems. The findings suggest that, in addition to biological factors, sociocultural and economic factors significantly influence dyslexia. Furthermore, this paper reviews the current methods used to identify dyslexia and the interventions being implemented across different regions of China. At present, research in Mainland China remains in the developmental stage. Hence, this paper offers some recommendations for language policy and educational practice with the aim of creating a more inclusive education system that can effectively support every learner.

Thirty-Three Moments of the Soviet Position on the German Question

Tsotne Tchanturia — 2025-09-15

This article presents the microhistory of the Soviet position on the German question from 1985 to 1990, drawing on Russian-language archival materials, mainly Gorbachev’s correspondence published by the Gorbachev Foundation. In addition to offering this microhistory, it aims to illuminate the long-debated “not one inch eastward” assurance by analysing its context. This research demonstrates that, during 1989-1990, Western oral pledges to the Soviet leadership regarding NATO’s non-enlargement sometimes specifically referred to the territory of the (former)1 GDR, at other times to the Eastern Bloc beyond the (former) GDR, and in some instances resembled a general promise of NATO’s future non-enlargement to the east. Furthermore, the article highlights that during the negotiations on Germany, the Soviets had concerns about pro-NATO aspirations in the Eastern Bloc (beyond the GDR) and the risks of future NATO enlargement eastward, beyond the (former) GDR. Ultimately, the article proposes a theoretical framework to explain why the Soviets accepted a status quo that risked NATO’s eastward expansion, despite their awareness of the associated risks and the absence of any legal guarantees against enlargement.

The Social Construction of the Sexes in Post-War Germany

Stella–Alkistis Moysidou — 2025-10-18

Macroscopically, in the broader context, the emergence of women’s dominant role in society is attributed to the social reformations in the Sixties, not the reforms of the immediate post-war years. The normalisation of gender definitions foreshadowing people’s affairs was based on the principle of male power, whose agency was declared dogmatic and authoritarian within traditional societal norms (family, workplace, sexuality, the army, religion, or other personal beliefs). Gender inequalities in post-war society were evident, even though the ambivalence on gender hierarchies during the war did not persist. Women performed certain societal roles, mainly as canonised collaborative nuclear family figures. The impact of the war has proven robust not only on the art sector but also on everyday life and social activities that shape gender relations. At the end of the 1930s, the archetype of male soldiers, acting as the safeguard of the family and the homeland, was still lingering to create social figures.

Yoruba Diaspora and the “Obaship” System

Oluranti Edward Ojo — 2025-10-18

Yoruba traditional political institutions have played a significant role in shaping governance and socio-cultural organisation in Northern Nigeria. The Yoruba monarch (Oba) in this region represents a symbol of cultural values, ethnic cohesion and political sagacity in a society with different historical, social and ethno-religious backgrounds. This study historicizes the Yoruba migration into Northern Nigeria as well as the emergence, structure, functions, significance and contemporary relevance of Yoruba monarchs (Obas) in the North, highlighting their roles as cultural custodians, mediators, and sources of authority. The study examines the adaptive strategies employed by Yoruba monarchs to navigate the complex socio-political landscape, characterised by ethnic pluralism and religious diversity, while maintaining a connection to their ancestral roots. It also addresses the challenges faced by these monarchies, such as the opposition of Southwest state governments, the impact of Western education, opposition of Yoruba Obas and groups in Southwest Nigeria, hostility from host communities, limited resources, absence of government support and policy, absence of legal backing, intra-ethnic clashes of interest and religious beliefs. By drawing upon historical analysis, ethnographic data, and contemporary accounts, this study aims to illuminate the pivotal role of Yoruba monarchs as both symbolic figures and active participants in the governance and cultural preservation of their communities. The study concludes that the Obaship Yoruba system in Northern Nigeria is a demonstration of cultural identity in a foreign land. Therefore, the study recommends that traditional political institutions and preservation of cultural values in diaspora should be strengthened and used as a means of conflict management, cultural diplomacy and peace-building in the host community.

‘Cause Synthesis Never Still

Madalin Onu — 2025-09-15

Reading Charlie Johns’s History of Philosophy in 100 Pages is like stepping onto a street where Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Meillassoux walk beside you. The book refuses the stillness of catalogue entries, offering instead concepts as living “signatures”—each a doorway rather than a lid. Motion, speculative realism, and hermeneutical openness combine so that thinking is simultaneously historical, ethical, and cosmologically aware. Brevity becomes a vehicle for circulation: thought can be pocketed, read on a train, or left as a quiet provocation. Philosophy is restored as public, operative, and ethically alert, a Swiss army knife of ideas for anyone who wants to do things with thought.

Book Review
Charlie Johns. 2025. A History of Philosophy in 100 Pages. UK: London Academic Publishing.

Erasing the Boundaries between the Past and the Present in Sam Shepard’s “True West” and “Buried Child”

Olfa Gandouz — 2025-09-15

From a postmodern approach, this paper studies the notion of erasure in Shepard’s True West (1980) and Buried Child (1979), and it focuses on the impossibility of erasing the agrarian past, as well as the inability to ignore the postmodern present. To better understand the playwright’s redefinition of erasure, it is pertinent to first study the relationship between the past and the present in Buried Child. The author refers to Harold Bloom’s Anatomy of Influence to examine the way Shepard revisits the frontier and the Corn King myth. Realism, postmodernist features, simulacrum, surrealism, absurdity, Aristotelian tragedy, dramatic elements, and thematic concerns are deployed to explore the protagonists’ quest for self-definition, for finding out the characteristics of a true Westerner, and for disclosing that the true Western self is reformed through going beyond erasure and blurring the boundaries between temporal planes.

Self as Performative Gesture

Nathaniel Spencer-Cross — 2025-10-18

This research paper examines author-characters in autofiction, arguing that their liminal insertion between fact and fiction disrupts traditional perceptions of authorial authenticity. Through analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade and Ben Lerner’s 10:04, I establish how author-characters (distinct from self-inserts or authorial surrogates) function as multi-layered representations which both embody and fictionalise the author. Using Roland Barthes’s interrogation of narrative voice and Jacques Derrida’s theory of trace, I contend that author-characters expose the futility of accurate self-representation in literature. By intentionally blurring autobiography and fiction, author-characters in autofiction challenge genre boundaries while simultaneously foregrounding the instability of identity.

Narration in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India"

Salah Chraiti — 2025-09-15

The present paper explores E.M. Forster’s peculiar, yet elusive style in disclosing the racial and imperial thought embedded in the text and maintained by non-native people. Despite its ambivalent attitude towards the native, the novel’s discourse of benevolence and the rhetoric of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ could not hide the discourse of colonial domination. To unmask this view, Forster adopts a particular narratorial technique. Such an adoption, therefore, is to be explained through the study of the 'speech act' as one of the main angles to deal with narration in A Passage to India. Likewise, this paper attempts to study the ‘reporting act’ which requires analysing speech and thought representation in the novel.

Hegel, Haiti and Fanon

Jack Dignam — 2025-09-15

In her now seminal work, Susan Buck-Morss links the Haitian Revolution with the slave writings of Hegel, positing that the revolt in Haiti constitutes a moment of dialectical import. She is not, however, the only dialectician to have read the Haitian Revolution through Hegel’s master–slave dialectic. Indeed, Frantz Fanon's canonical Black Skin, White Mask also made reference to such events, although Buck-Morss' engagement with him, in her work, is sparse. In this article, then, through confronting Buck-Morss' account with Fanon, I argue that Buck-Morss' argument loses sight of the material utilised in the master/slave abstraction, namely the actual lived experiences of colonial subjects, thereby glossing over the particularity of the material. In contrast, Fanon's account reincorporates the concrete situatedness into the master/slave dialectic, thereby surpassing typical limitations of philosophical abstraction, which has concrete political implications.

Determining Personal Falsity

Kirstin Varallo — 2025-09-15

This paper attempts to develop a criterion for determining when one’s own opinion is incorrect. I first establish a Gadamerian critique of Enlightenment objectivism, and continue by stating that neither radical objectivism nor radical relativism is an applicable standard within epistemology. There must be both some valid and some invalid opinions. In dialogue with Georgia Warnke, the discussion of right and wrong perception is based on the minimums of immediate illegitimizing of certain prejudices: part-whole incongruity and dogmatic opinions.

Further, in conjunction with María Lugones’s theory of “world-travelling”, I state that one is unable to adequately dismiss an individual’s opinion on a phenomenon until they have “travelled” to the individual’s “world” and experienced the phenomenon through that individual’s personal epistemology. To get a proper and best-as-possible understanding of someone’s stance, especially a stance that opposes one’s own, one must address or interrogate the prejudices that are tied to the stance itself, and meaningfully investigating another person’s prejudices/perceptions requires travelling to their world. As this is incredibly difficult to do and requires high amounts of time and epistemic/hermeneutic labour, it becomes more efficient to be reflexive for only oneself than for others. I develop a criterion to determine such personal falsity, where, first, building off Vrinda Dalmiya and Linda Alcoff, one must determine either propositional/theoretical or practical/educational expertise in the individual with the opposing opinion to one’s own. An expert’s differing stance is merely a signal to continue with research into the relevant inquiry. One must maintain the belief that opinions necessitate their own change, and expertise does not always stem from those with the most prestige behind their name. Humility is the crucial factor in the opinion-changing process that stands as the fountainhead of good knowledge.

A Philosophical Analogy Between Quantum Theory and Phenomenal Consciousness

Konstantinos Voukydis — 2025-09-15

This study outlines the core objective: to explore an analogical argument between quantum mechanics and phenomenal consciousness. The work proposes that phenomenal consciousness and quantum phenomena share structural features—such as observer-dependence, contextual emergence, and perspectival constitution—that justify the use of analogy not as metaphor, but as a philosophical method. It also critically examines the status, limits, and epistemic implications of analogical reasoning in this context.

Tracing the Borders of Human Free Will

Emanuele Lacca — 2025-09-15

This contribution aims to reconstruct the concept of common good, as elaborated by the American-Slovakian philosopher Michael Novak in his text The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Published in 1993 by The Free Press, this book deals both genealogically and theoretically with this notion, indicating it as the only one capable of guaranteeing integral development for human beings in the new millennium.

The common good, in fact, has the merit of tracing the limits within which human beings can be defined as persons and, in this context, indicate their freedom. This contribution, taking its starting point precisely from this definition, will be concerned, on the one hand, with presenting the fundamental stages which, according to Novak, have contributed to the formation of the common good as we know it and, on the other, with highlighting the innovations proposed by Novak himself.

The working methodology is historical-hermeneutic. After having framed the text from a historical point of view, enucleating the author's editorial motives, we will move on to analyse its key moments in order to highlight its most decisive contents.