Internationally renowned as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century, the late Emmanuel Levinas remains a pivotal figure across the humanistic disciplines for his insistence -- against the grain of Western philosophical tradition -- on the primacy of ethics in philosophical investigation. This first English translation of a series of twelve essays known as _Alterity and Transcendence_ offers a unique glimpse of Levinas defining his own place in the history of philosophy. Published by a mature thinker between (...) 1967 and 1989, these works exhibit a refreshingly accessible perspective that seasoned admirers and newcomers will appreciate. In today's world, where religious conceptions of exalted higher powers are constantly called into question by theoretical investigation and by the powerful influence of science and technology on our understanding of the universe, has the notion of transcendence been stripped of its significance? In Levinas's incisive model, transcendence is indeed alive -- not in any notion of our relationship to a mysterious, sacred realm but in the idea of our worldly, subjective relationships to others. Without presupposing an intimate knowledge of the history of philosophy, Levinas explores the ways in which Plotinus, Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger have encountered the question of transcendence. In discourses on the concepts of totality and infinity, he locates his own thinking in the context of pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, and Descartes. Always centering his discussions on the idea of interpersonal relations as the basis of transcendence, Levinas reflects on the rights of individuals, the concept of peace, and the dialogic nature of philosophy. Finally, in interviews conducted by Christian Chabanis and Angelo Bianchi, Levinas responds to key questions not directly addressed in his writings. Throughout, _Alterity and Transcendence_ reveals a commitment to ethics as first philosophy -- obliging modern thinkers to investigate not merely the true but the good. (shrink)

In the most comprehensive examination to date of Heidegger’s Nazism, Emmanuel Faye draws on previously unavailable materials to paint a damning picture of Nazism’s influence on the philosopher’s thought and politics. In this provocative book, Faye uses excerpts from unpublished seminars to show that Heidegger’s philosophical writings are fatally compromised by an adherence to National Socialist ideas. In other documents, Faye finds expressions of racism and exterminatory anti-Semitism. Faye disputes the view of Heidegger as a naïve, temporarily disoriented academician and (...) instead shows him to have been a self-appointed “spiritual guide” for Nazism whose intentionality was clear. Contrary to what some have written, Heidegger’s Nazism became even more radical after 1935, as Faye demonstrates. He revisits Heidegger’s masterwork, _Being and Time_, and concludes that in it Heidegger does not present a philosophy of individual existence but rather a doctrine of radical self-sacrifice, where individualization is allowed only for the purpose of heroism in warfare. Faye’s book was highly controversial when originally published in France in 2005. Now available in Michael B. Smith’s fluid English translation, it is bound to awaken controversy in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers are increasingly turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to bring a consideration of ethics into their own thinking. As an exponent of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas ranks with Heidegger and Sartre; as a disciple of Husserl, he was one of the most independent and original interpreters, testifying to the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenology. In collecting almost all of Levinas's articles on Husserlian phenomenology, this volume gathers together a wealth of thoughtful exposition and interpretation by one of the (...) most important European philosophers of the twentieth century. Levinas's thought is relevant to a broad variety of disciplines and concerns. This volume serves as a reliable introduction for the beginning student, as well as satisfying the expert's more demanding and critical desire for insight into the complexities of Levinas's thought. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most important figures of twentieth-century philosophy. Exerting a profound influence upon such thinkers as Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, and Irigaray, Levinas's work bridges several major gaps in the evolution of continental philosophy -- between modern and postmodern, phenomenology and poststructuralism, ethics and ontology. He is credited with having spurred a revitalized interest in ethics-based philosophy throughout Europe and America. _Entre Nous_ is the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. Published in France a few years before his death, (...) it gathers his most important work and reveals the development of his thought over nearly forty years of committed inquiry. Along with several trenchant interviews published here, these essays engage with issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory. Taken together, they constitute a key to Levinas's ideas on the ethical dimensions of otherness. Working from the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Levinas pushed beyond the limits of their framework to argue that it is ethics, not ontology, that orients philosophy, and that responsibility precedes reasoning. Ethics for Levinas means responsibility in relation to difference. Throughout his work, Levinas returns to the metaphor of the face of the other to discuss how and where responsibility enters our lives and makes philosophy necessary. For Levinas, ethics begins with our face to face interaction with another person -- seeing that person not as a reflection of one's self, nor as a threat, but as different and greater than self. Levinas moves the reader to recognize the implications of this interaction: our abiding responsibility for the other, and our concern with the other's suffering and death. Situated at the crossroads of several philosophical schools and approaches, Levinas's work illuminates a host of critical issues and has found resonances among students and scholars of literature, law, religion, and politics. _Entre Nous_ is at once the apotheosis of his work and an accessible introduction to it. In the end, Levinas's urgent meditations upon the face of the other suggest a new foundation upon which to grasp the nature of good and evil in the tangled skein of our lives. (shrink)

Machiavelli in the Making is both a novel interpretation of the Florentine’s work and a critical document for understanding influential French scholar and public intellectual Claude Lefort’s later writings on democracy and totalitarianism. Lefort extricates Machiavelli’s thought from the dominant interpretations of him as the founder of “objective” political science, which, having liberated itself from the religious and moralizing tendencies of medieval political reflection, attempts to arrive at a realistic discourse on the operations of raw power. Lefort ultimately finds that (...) Machiavelli’s discourse opens the “place of the political” which had previously been occupied by theology and morality. (shrink)

The article differentiates between the manifestation of recurrence qua consciousness and an underlying recurrence elaborated by Levinas in subjectivity beyond being. The movement of recurrence is traced in its relation to creation. Ethics is the language in which the selfless can be expressed, where value obtains in lieu of being. The philosophical problem to which recurrence is a response is posited as ipseity versus identiy. The self imposed obstacles to extracting a moral doctrine from the levinasian corpus are discussed, followed (...) by suggestions on the difference a levinasian view might make in our understanding and undertaking of every day life. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt", "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence", and "Eye and Mind", have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished (...) scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic. (shrink)

We describe a general problem solving mechanism that is especially suited for performing a particular form of abductive inference, or best-explanation finding. A problem solver embodying this mechanism synthesizes composite hypotheses. It does so by by combining hypothesis parts as a means to the satisfaction of explanatory goals. In this way it is able to arrive at complex, integrated conclusions which are not pre-stored.The intent is to present a computationally-feasible, task-specific problem solver for a particular information processing task which is (...) nevertheless of very great generality. The task is that of synthesizing coherent composite explanatory hypotheses based upon a prestored, and possibly vast collection of hypothesis-generating “concepts”. The authors’ claim is nothing less than to have shown, in a new sense, and surpassing all other work in this area, how it is computationally possible for an agent to come to “know”, based upon the evidence of the case. (shrink)

Red-2 is a computer program for red-cell antibody identification, a piece of "normal science". Abstracting from Red-2, a general problem solving mechanism is described that is especially suited for performing a form of abductive inference or best explanation finding. A problem solver embodying this mechanism synthesizes composite hypotheses by combining hypothesis parts. This is a common task of intelligence, and a component of scientific reasoning. The work addresses the question, 'How is science possible?' by showing how a simple but powerful (...) form of hypothesis synthesis is computationally feasible. (shrink)

The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount of talk and the lexical diversity in that talk. There are disagreements in the literature whether amount or diversity is the more critical (...) measure of the input. Here we analyze the properties of a large corpus of speech to children and simulate learning environments that differ in amount of talk per unit time, lexical diversity, and the contexts of talk. The central conclusion is that what researchers need to theoretically understand, measure, and change is not the total amount of words, or the diversity of words, but the function that relates total words to the diversity of words, and how that function changes across different contexts of talk. (shrink)

In the mid-20th century, descriptive meta-ethics addressed a number of central questions, such as whether there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether moral reasons are absolute or relative, and whether moral judgments express attitudes or describe states of affairs. I maintain that much of this work in mid-20th century meta-ethics proceeded on an assumption that there is good reason to question. The assumption was that our ordinary discourse is uniform and determinate enough to vindicate one side (...) or the other of these meta-ethical debates. I suggest that ordinary moral discourse may be much less uniform and determinate than 20th century meta-ethics assumed. (shrink)

The Cambridge Platonists were a group of religious thinkers who attended and taught at Cambridge from the 1640s until the 1660s. The four most important of them were Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and Henry More. The most prominent sentimentalist moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment – Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith – knew of the works of the Cambridge Platonists. But the Scottish sentimentalists typically referred to the Cambridge Platonists only briefly and in passing. The surface (...) of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith's texts can give the impression that the Cambridge Platonists were fairly distant intellectual relatives of the Scottish sentimentalists – great great-uncles, perhaps, and uncles of a decidedly foreign ilk. But this surface appearance is deceiving. There were deeply significant philosophical connections between the Cambridge Platonists and the Scottish sentimentalists, even if the Scottish sentimentalists themselves did not always make it perfectly explicit. (shrink)

What role do general principles play in our moral judgment? This question has been much contested among moral theorists of the last fifteen years. When we turn to the British moralists of the eighteenth century, we find that the same question was equally pressing. In this paper, I show that while many of the British moralists thought that general principles could conclusively determine our moral duties, David Hume and Adam Smith were ambivalent about the role of moral principles, not (...) only giving expression to the common view of principles’ power but also exploring the possibility that principles could not fill the justificatory space typically allotted them. Hume and Smith, I show, constitute fascinating transitional figures in our thinking about the role of general moral principles. (shrink)

This seminal collection on the ethical issues associated with infectious disease is the first book to correct bioethics’ glaring neglect of this subject. Timely in view of public concern about SARS, AIDS, avian flu, bioterrorism and antibiotic resistance. Brings together new and classic papers by prominent figures. Tackles the ethical issues associated with issues such as quarantine, vaccination policy, pandemic planning, biodefense, wildlife disease and health care in developing countries.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

MEDIEVAL LOGICS LAMBERT MARIE DE RIJK (ed.), Die mittelalterlichen Traktate De mod0 opponendiet respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge Band 17.) Miinster: Aschendorff, 1980. 379 pp. No price stated. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MARTA FATTORI, Lessico del Novum Organum di Francesco Bacone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1980. Two volumes, il + 543, 520 pp. Lire 65.000. VIVIAN SALMON, The study of language in 17th century England. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory (...) and History of Linguistic Science, Series 111: Studies in theHistory of Linguistics, Volume 17.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979.x + 218 pp. Dfl. 65. Theoria cum Praxi. Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. (Akten des 111. Internationalen Leibnizkongress, Hannover, 12. bis 17.November 1977, Band 111: Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, Metaphysik, Theologie.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. vii + 269 pp. DM 48. CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS MICHAEL CLARK, The place of syllogistic in logical theory. Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1980. ix + 151 pp. £3.00. A.F. PARKER-RHODES, The theory of indistinguishables. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. xvii + 216 pp. Dfl.90.00/$39.50. NICHOLAS RESCHER and ROBERT BRANDOM, The logic of inconsistency. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1980. x + 174 pp. f 11.50. MISCELLANEOUS J. ZELENY, The logic of Marx. Translated from the German by T. Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xcii + 247 pp. £12.50. FELIX KAUFMANN, The infinite in mathematics. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Introduction by E. Nagel. Translation from the German by Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. xvii + 235 pp. Dfl 85/$39.50 (cloth); Dfl 45/$19.95 (paper). PAMELA MCCORDUCK, Machines who think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. xiv + 275 pp. $14.95. J. MITTELSTRASS (ed.), Enzyklopadie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie Bd. 1 : A-G. Mannheim, Wien, Ziirich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1980. 835 pp. DM 128. (shrink)

In this essay, I shall assume that at least some groups are moral agents, a view successfully argued for by Peter French (1972, 1979, 1981). To that view I add only the following two refinements: (a) The reality of group or organizational agents depends on the existence of rules that constitute them. Because a moral agent acts in a community of moral agents, it is important that the rules that give a group agent its identity be accepted not only by (...) persons in the group but also by the persons and groups with which that group can reasonably be expected to interact. (b) The rule structure of groups provides a basis for claims about the (in)-voluntariness of group action. This is especially important in moral contexts. My primary concern in the essay will be to lay a conceptual foundation for certain normative questions about group moral agency. The questions with which I shall be concerned have to do most directly with the structure of the organization itself and only indirectly with its interactions with others. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT René Descartes is the founder of modern philosophy. There is far less consensus on the question of what his modernity means. The majority of Descartes’s readers have focused on the cogito, the “I think” that is the fons et origo of all knowledge. The method of doubt and the famous rules of evidence have played a crucial role in the formation of a distinctively modern search for foundations of truth. Political theorists have frequently (...) treated Descartes as the harbinger of a new age, but there is widespread disagreement over precisely what this means. Tocqueville regarded the Cartesian method as ideally suited to the new democratic age. “The philosophical method established by Descartes,” he wrote, “is not only French but democratic, which explains why it was so easily accepted in all of Europe, whose face it has contributed so much to changing.” For Michael Oakeshott, Descartes, along with. (shrink)

It is hard to see why the head and other brain-containing parts of a person are not themselves persons, or at least thinking, conscious beings. Some theorists have sought to reconcile us to the existence of thinking person-parts. Others have sought to avoid them but have relied on radical theories at odds with the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. This paper offers a novel, conservative solution, one on which the heads and other brain-containing parts of persons do exist (...) but are neither persons, thinkers, nor conscious beings. A much briefer statement of the solution is found in section 5 of Burke 2004. (shrink)

A particular feature of this book is substantial "Stretch and Challenge" material throughout which allows students to develop further.

Peter Forrest argues that theism is warranted by an inference to the best explanation that does not posit God as a supernatural entity. Lest theists fear that Forrest settles for an ersatz naturalistic conception of God, let me reassure them that his view might be captured by the slogan, "Neither a naturalist nor a supernaturalist be!" Both naturalism and supernaturalism attempt to understand what Forrest calls the "familiar"—the things observable by humans, including the phenomena of consciousness—but they differ about the (...) constraints on acceptable explanations. Naturalism accepts, while supernaturalism rejects, the following constraints: don't posit an "unfamiliar" entity unless a well-confirmed scientific theory provides a "precedent" for it, and don't violate any well-confirmed laws of nature. Forrest's antisupernaturalism accepts, but weakens to : don't posit an unfamiliar kind of entity unless there is some precedent for it, either in the familiar entities we already believe in, or in a well-confirmed scientific theory. Thus, every naturalistic explanation is antisupernaturalist, but some antisupernaturalist ones are not naturalistic because they posit unfamiliar entities on the basis of a commonsense nonscientific theory. (shrink)

The question of (prima facie) formal moral obligation to obey the law remains a perennial in the garden of philosophy. In this paper I consider two recent attempts to dig it up by the roots. The first attempt to settle the question of formal moral obligation to obey the law I shall consider here appeared in the Yale Law Review almost a decade ago. Its author, M. B. E. Smith, argued that there is no such obligation. The article has (...) since been reprinted in a number of popular philosophical anthologies. Hyman Gross has described it as one of "the two most influential works on the morality of civil disobedience." 2 The argument has, as far as I can tell, not been criticized in print. The other attempt to answer that perennial question appeared in Bernard Gert's The Moral Rules (originally published seven years before Smith's article). Gert argued that there is a formal moral obligation to obey the law. Gert's book seems to have received little attention from philosophers. His argument for obligation to obey the law has, as far as I can tell, received no attention at all. Even Smith said nothing about it. The argument seems to have fallen into that silence all writers fear. Yet, it seems to me, Gert has the better answer. (shrink)

This is an anthology of ?fteen papers concerning various philosophical problems related to the topic of self-knowledge. All but one of the papers were previously unpublished, and all but two are descendants of presentations at a conference on self-knowledge held at the University of St Andrews in 1995. The collection.

William AIston has argued that the prospects are dim for demonstrating with out epistemic circularity that any of our fundamental doxastic practices are reliable. In response to this predicament, he supplies a pragmatic rationale for our continued engagement in these practices. I argue that either he relativizes the practical rationality of engaging in a doxastic practice to participants, which ill suits his aim of providing a realist account of the practice that provides nonparticipants with are as on to trust that (...) the practice is reliable, or he provides participants with no reason to trust their own practice in the face of actual or possible rival practices that issue in incompatible beliefs, unless they take as such a reason the bare fact that this practice is the one they happen to have. This too does not accord well with the need to provide an account of our practices that provides room for critical scrutiny of them. (shrink)

William AIston has argued that the prospects are dim for demonstrating with out epistemic circularity that any of our fundamental doxastic practices are reliable. In response to this predicament, he supplies a pragmatic rationale for our continued engagement in these practices. I argue that either he relativizes the practical rationality of engaging in a doxastic practice to participants, which ill suits his aim of providing a realist account of the practice that provides nonparticipants with are as on to trust that (...) the practice is reliable, or he provides participants with no reason to trust their own practice in the face of actual or possible rival practices that issue in incompatible beliefs, unless they take as such a reason the bare fact that this practice is the one they happen to have. This too does not accord well with the need to provide an account of our practices that provides room for critical scrutiny of them. (shrink)

The abandonment of sole reliance on the logical positivist canon of wholly general, topic-neutral, a priori inference principles has created a pressing need for a principled way to set limits on the demand for justification. I diagnose the problems with several contemporary proposals via two case studies, the first concerned with the possibility of groundlessly rational theism, and the second with the use of groundlessly rational commitments in defense of scientific rationality. ;I argue that William Alston's appeal to the "practical" (...) rationality of engaging in a socially established belief-forming practice and Alvin Plantinga's defense of properly basic belief in God are overly permissive. Alston's position gives too much scope to pragmatic and social considerations, while Plantinga's rejection of polemically useful epidemic principles leaves him with an implausible externalism about rationality as the only way to block irrationality. In the case of scientific rationality, I argue that Bas van Fraassen's "liberal probabilism" gives too much scope to tradition and pragmatic factors, while Richard Boyd's methodological argument for scientific realism gives too much weight to the successful use of theories that happen to belong to one's own scientific tradition. ;In the light of these defects, I argue that the only propositions that don't require justification are "hinge-propositions"--topic-specific, defeasible principles that express conceptual competence conditions--because groundless doubt of them is either irrational or betrays lack of conceptual grasp. ;This account provides adequate fundamental principles for science, but sets strict limits to groundless rationality. For example, theistic belief-forming practices can't be groundlessly rational because they involve an unjustified departure from the application of the concept of a person in response to experience. ;I defend the closure claim that hinge-propositions are the only kind of groundlessly rational propositions by arguing that this account provides the best explanation for our shared uncontroversial judgments of rationality and irrationality. My account makes the strongest demands for justification that are compatible with our shared and secure judgments of prima facie rationality and the weakest demands for justification that are compatible with our shared and secure judgments about epistemically responsible beliefs. (shrink)

Editors of Lysistrate have regarded this passage as a kind of cursus honorum of a well-brought-up young Athenian lady: the chorine first served at the age of seven as a bearer of the sacred casket ; then at the age of ten as miller of corn for Athena Archegetis ; then followed service as a ‘bear’ of Artemis at the Brauronia; finally, she returned to Athens as a basket-bearer , holding a string of figs, when a fair young girl. After (...) this, presumably, she married. There are several difficulties in this interpretation: notably, the intrusion into service apparently wholly devoted to Athena of a spell as one of Artemis' servants at Brauron; moreover, the evidence is that Artemis' ‘bears’ were pre-pubescent, not young girls on the verge of marriage, as the above interpretation seems to require them to be. Another weakness lies in the period of service as an arrephoros: this passage seems to be the only direct evidence that arrephoroi might be seven-year-old, rather than adolescent, girls. A more extreme interpretation is that of A. Brelich, who regarded this passage as proof that there existed in fifth-century Athens a system of universal female initiation, based on four successive grades, arrephoria, aletria, arkteia and kanephoria. I do not propose to comment in detail upon Brelich's hypothesis, but critics of it might begin by questioning the age and number of the arrephoroi, and the function and location of the kanephoroi. (shrink)

Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek saw the liberty principle as focal and accorded it strong presumption, but their wisdom invokes how little we can know. In Knowledge and Coordination, Daniel Klein re-examines the elements of economic liberalism. He interprets Hayek's notion of spontaneous order from the aestheticized perspective of a Smithian spectator, real or imagined. Klein addresses issues economists have had surrounding the notion of coordination by distinguishing the concatenate coordination of Hayek, Ronald Coase, and Michael Polanyi from (...) the mutual coordination of Thomas Schelling and game theory. Clarifying the meaning of cooperation, he resolves debates over whether entrepreneurial innovation enhances or upsets coordination, and thus interprets entrepreneurship in terms of discovery or new knowledge. Beyond information, knowledge entails interpretation and judgment, emergent from tacit reaches of the "society of mind," itself embedded in actual society. Rejecting homo economicus in favor of the "deepself," Klein offers a distinctive formulation of knowledge economics, entailing asymmetric interpretation, judgment, entrepreneurship, error, and correction-and kinds of discovery-which all serve the cause of liberty. This richness of knowledge joins agent and analyst, and meaningful theory depends on tacit affinities between the two. Knowledge and Coordination highlights the recurring connections to underlying purposes and sensibilities, of analysts as well as agents. Behind economic talk of market communication and social error and correction lies Klein's Smithian allegory, with the allegorical spectator representing a conception of the social. Knowledge and Coordination instructs us to declare such allegory. Knowledge and Coordination is an authoritative take on how, by confessing the looseness of its judgments and the by-and-large status of its claims, laissez-faire liberalism makes its economic doctrines more robust and its presumption of liberty more viable. (shrink)

Too often in economics the understanding of how things work by and large--not axiomatically or categorically--and the idea that we generally cannot know the economic system well enough to intervene into it beneficially are done less than justice. Yet they were Adam Smith's central messages for public policy, and they authorized a presumption of liberty, thus exceptions to liberty should be treated as exceptional and bear the burden of proof.In Knowledge and Coordination, Daniel Klein reexamines the elements of economic (...) liberalism. He interprets Friedrich Hayek's notion of spontaneous order from the aestheticized perspective of an allegorical Smithian spectator. Klein addresses issues economists have had surrounding the notion of coordination by distinguishing the concatenate coordination of Hayek, Ronald Coase, and Michael Polanyi from the mutual coordination of Thomas Schelling and game theory. Clarifying the meaning of "cooperation," he resolves debates over whether entrepreneurial innovation enhances or upsets coordination. Entrepreneurship is interpreted in terms of discovery, or new knowledge. He points out that beyond information, knowledge entails interpretation and judgment. Rejecting homo economicus, Klein offers a distinctive formulation of knowledge economics, entailing asymmetric interpretation, judgment, entrepreneurship, error and correction. This richness of knowledge joins agent and analyst, and meaningful theory depends on tacit affinities between the two, even common contacts with an allegorical spectator. Knowledge and Coordination illuminates the recurring connections to underlying purposes and sensibilities, of analysts as well as agents. Knowledge and Coordination is an imaginative and insightful take on how, by confessing the looseness of its judgments and the by-and-large status of its claims, laissez-faire liberalism makes its economic doctrines more robust and its presumption of liberty more viable. (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defend a surprising answer last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. For replies to critics, see my publications of 1997 and (especially) 2004.

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from (...) theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals. (shrink)