In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154, DAVID HUME'S PRACTICAL ECONOMICS As Professor Eugene Rotwein emphasized in his introduction to David Hume: Writings on Economics (Madison, 1955), the philosopher made his observations on the eve of the industrial revolution in a period of accelerating change. Very often — as in the latter half of the seventeenth century — times of flux and turmoil call forth Utopian thinkers, who propose the creation of hierarchical, communal, authoritarian (...) societies, often patterned after a supposed golden 2 age. Hume emphatically rejected Utopian schemes of this kind. "All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind," he said, 3 "are plainly imaginary." He repeatedly warned as well that "projectors" and visionaries would disrupt the balance in government between liberty and authority. Thus he could speak of or make reference to "the visionary system or ravings of Plato" (in The Republic), the ultimate impracticality of More's Utopia and James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana, and the absurdity of Robert Wallace's theories on 4 population and the paper money schemes of John Law. Even the Utopian republics of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the Scottish patriot whom Hume admired as "a man of undaunted courage and inflexible principles," were dismissed with the others on practical grounds. The key word we have extracted from Hume's economics is practicality. Much as Hume would have liked to have designed an empirical "science of man" — which, incidentally, would have permitted him to propose his own infallible scheme of political economy — he realized that his own attempts had fallen far short of his goal. Thus his nine essays devoted especially to economics: "Of Commerce," "Of Refinement 155. in the Arts," "Of Money," "Of Interest," "Of the Balance of Trade," "Of the Jealousy of Trade," "Of Taxes," "Of Public Credit," and "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," are cautious in approach and pragmatic in spirit. Most of these essays were specifically designed to challenge prevailing assumptions and Utopian grand schemes of one sort or another. In "Of Commerce," for example, Hume rejects the idea that a nation can achieve greatness as an agricultural utopia. In "Of Refinement in the Arts" he takes issue with certain religious thinkers who 7 denote luxury as evil. In "Of Money" he is critical of those who believe that an injection of money into O the economy will work long-term wonders, and in "Of Interest" he argues with those who reason that the 9 plenty of money leads to low interest rates. "Of the Balance of Trade" and "Of the Jealousy of Trade" are directed against the protectionist policies of the mercantilists, "Of Taxes" rejects the French physiocratic single tax on land, and "Of Public Credit" deplores the expedients of Lord Oxford's partisans to draw bills on posterity and imprudently 12 use public credit to create paper riches. Finally, he addressed his essay, "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations" to a refutation of the doomsday thinking of 13 the Reverend Robert Wallace of Edinburgh. This is not to imply, however, that Hume's economic thought was merely negative, or that he believed governments could safely entrust their powers over the economy to an "invisible hand." Even Hume's advocacy of free trade (which his friend and pupil Adam Smith, of course, applied with less caution) left the government with room to maneuver. Hume was willing to employ both the market and authority in designs for human progress. In seeking his mix of "action, 156. consumption, liveliness and indolence," a contradictory, counter-poised economic actor, the individual, was not a simple pleasure maximizer, nor did the acquisition of wealth and luxury make him a villain. He was a person in whom the complex springs of action, the causes of labour, needed first one, now another counter-weight. Society benefited from both 14 free trade and from tariff. Hume believed that industrial development and the advancement of commerce were the springboards to progress and happiness. Less is less and more is more; Hume never got these simple verities mixed up. "The same age," he said, "which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skillful weavers, and ship-carpenters.... The spirit of the age... (shrink)

Marshall et al. (2024) identify a potential ethical conflict between the principles of beneficence and respect for patient autonomy when patients refuse to remain in an emergency department (ED) fo...

Robert Lassalle-Klein’s paper has provided an examination of how Ignatio Ellacuría, working with philosopher Xavier Zubiri, both used and criticized some of Karl Rahner’s key ideas for the purpose of finding a philosophical framework for working out Ellacuría’s own theological vision, rooted in his experiences as a Spanish Jesuit serving in Latin America. While the technical work in this adaptation receives some commentary here, most of my remarks are observations about the impact of this work on Rahner scholarship more generally. (...) Ellacuría’s use of Rahner is in marked contrast to Metz’s critique that saw Rahner’s transcendental method incapable of dealing with historical realities. Ellacuría’s work can be understood as supplying a particularity to Rahner’s austere structures that, I argue, is intrinsic to those structures. As such, Ellacuría’s work should be adopted into the canon of mainstream Rahner scholarship. (shrink)

What do human beings use conditional reasoning for? A psychological consequence of counterfactual conditional reasoning is emotional experience, in particular, regret and relief. Adults’ thoughts about what might have been influence their evaluations of reality. We discuss recent psychological experiments that chart the relationship between children’s ability to engage in conditional reasoning and their experience of counterfactual emotions. Relative to conditional reasoning, counterfactual emotions are late developing. This suggests that children need not only competence in conditional reasoning, but also to (...) engage in this thinking spontaneously. Developments in domain general cognitive processing (the executive functions) allow children to develop from conditional reasoning to reasoning with counterfactual content and, eventually, to experiencing counterfactual emotions. (shrink)

The performance of 93 children aged 3 and 4 years on a battery of different counterfactual tasks was assessed. Three measures: short causal chains, location change counterfactual conditionals, and false syllogisms—but not a fourth, long causal chains—were correlated, even after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. Children's performance on our counterfactual thinking measure was predicted by receptive vocabulary ability and inhibitory control. The role that domain general executive functions may play in 3- to 4-year olds' counterfactual thinking development is discussed.

What is "critical thinking"? -- What is "law"? : thinking critically about legal perspectives -- Putting critical thinking into legal practice -- Thinking critically about assessments -- Thinking critically in the workplace and beyond.

This article seeks to present a detailed textual analysis of Protagoras’ Great Speech in Plato's Protagoras. I will argue that the concept of ἀρετή as it appears in the Great Speech is whittled down to a vague notion of civic duty. In this respect, Protagoras is bringing himself in line with the democracy, but in doing so the ἀρετή he claims to teach loses much of its initial appeal, particularly in the eyes of his aristocratic clientele. Nevertheless, if thecontentof Protagoras’ (...) Great Speech overlooks the abilities required to rise to political prominence, theformmost assuredly does not. As one would expect from Plato's Protagoras, his speech is replete with just that oratorical prowess his students might expect to acquire from him. This, in turn, has a number of interesting and important implications in the broader context of theProtagoras, in particular regarding the contrast or conflict between long speeches and short-answer dialectic. Moreover, although it has long been noticed that Protagoras neglects rhetoric and personal pre-eminence in his account, as far as I know there has not been any serious attempt to analyse the stylistic aspects of this masterful speech. Accordingly, both this and my attempt to interpret it within the economy of the dialogue are original. (shrink)

Adherence to a few basic principles of textbook reading compilation have made this one of the more worthwhile introductory philosophy texts. In the first place, the editors have given lengthy and frequently complete texts. Anselm's Proslogium, Descartes' Meditations, Plato's Phaedo, and Kant's Prolegomena are given complete or nearly complete; there is a ninety-one page extract from Locke's Essay, over fifty pages of James and nearly forty pages from Whitehead. This still leaves room for ample primary material by Leibniz, Hume, and (...) Schopenhauer. The plan of the book is to frame the important primary text with intellectually contemporaneous discussion of the problems treated in the primary text, and then to bracket each section with a prologue and epilogue drawn—except in the final section where Plato has the last word—from twentieth-century literature relevant to the issues under discussion in each section. The authors are thus able to provide an historical and thematic introduction to philosophy, which together cannot help but impress the beginning student with the unity of philosophical experience. Obviously no single textbook will ever escape the need for supplementation; this one in particular will require those who would like their students to be exposed to more phenomenology and existentialism, and, to a lesser degree, analytical philosophy, to introduce additional reading. But Epstein and Kennedy have provided the basic skeleton to which may be added as much flesh as the instructor desires.—E. A. R. (shrink)

There appears to be a wide measure of agreement, both amongst biologists and others, that Darwin's theory of evolution marks a major breakthrough in the science of biology; Darwin has even been called ‘Biology's Newton’, the highest term of praise that could be bestowed on a scientist. A. G. N. Flew, considering the matter from a philosophical point of view, says: ‘Yet one of the most important of all scientific theories is that developed by Darwin in his Origin of Species (...) . Covering the entire range of biological phenomena its scope is enormous. While if any scientific theory is interesting philosophically this one is.’ In spite of the testimony of both biologists and philosophers of science to the importance of the theory, it does not appear to play anything like the same role in biology as does Newton's theory in physics. For modern physics would be. (shrink)

In this paper we conduct an analysis of the critical narratives of Stardew Valley and compare them to other relevant videogames in order to develop new possibilities for an ecological critique of capitalist extractive econo­mies. Critical narratives of this game are aimed primarily at the alienating conditions of labour and deeply devastating modes of production under capitalism that impact and severely damage the environment. Analysing these narratives, we superimpose the immediate messages of the game with the procedural rhetoric and material (...) conditions of their existence. Over the course of our analysis, we highlight a material-narrative disso­nance which, in the case of Stardew Valley, fails to function as a commu­nicative strategy of the game and remains its mere external contradiction. Although the game’s critical narrative may seem overly utopian and its political imaginary a bit underdeveloped, the game elaborates on concrete ways to tackle the alienation of labour and resolve the ecological crisis. In addition to this, the paper covers the history of the interplay between the video game industry and the field of global ecological crisis research. We compare the attempts to raise awareness of the videogames’ own material­ity that preceded Stardew Valley. We conclude that Stardew Valley utilises the language of sustainable co-existence and wasteless local production, expanding this logic both to the sphere of labour and the spectrum of en­vironmental problems. In the case of ecological critique, some gameplay decisions in Stardew Valley enable us to come up with new strategies aimed at creating critical narratives about the environment in videogames. Thus supplementing Stardew Valley’s findings with critical tropes derived from other games (mainly, Rain World), we were able to gather a set of theoretical instruments that could facilitate the creation of games about ecosystems. Following Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the crucial role of narrative fram­ing (“it matters which stories tell stories”), we highlight new opportunities for the entire medium of videogames. (shrink)

When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_ and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This _Critique_ is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. (...) Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

New arguments against Bayesian regularity and an otherwise plausible domination principle are offered on the basis of rotational symmetry. The arguments against Bayesian regularity work in very general settings.

This paper examines the perceived ethical values of Malaysian managers. It is based on the opinions of 15 hypothetical ethical/unethical business situations from the 81 managers who agreed to participate in the survey. The findings of this study showed that these Malaysian managers have high ethical values. However 53% of the respondents believed that the ethical standards of today are lower than that of 15 years ago. Apparently, this is related to the existence of many unethical business practices prevalent in (...) the modern business world. The behavior of one's immediate superior is the most important factor in influencing managers to commit unethical practices. The results also indicate only a slight variation among the managers in terms of perceived ethical values by virtue of job position, job specialization, type of business activity or the size of the business organization. (shrink)

On the life of Mādhava, d. 1386, exponent of Dvaita philosophy.

Trope theory is a leading metaphysical theory in analytic ontology. One of its classic statements is found in the work of Donald C. Williams who argued that tropes qua abstract particulars are the very alphabet of being. The concept of an abstract particular has been repeatedly attacked in the literature. Opponents and proponents of trope theory alike have levelled their criticisms at the abstractness of tropes and the associated act of abstraction. In this paper I defend the concept of a (...) trope qua abstract particular by rejecting arguments that purport to show that tropes should not be understood as abstract and by arguing that the abstractness of tropes plays an indispensable role in one of our more promising trope-theoretic analyses of universals and of concrete objects. (shrink)

A law, say, prohibits homosexual conduct or punishes the prostitute for plying her trade. According to some it is a bad law, according to others a necessary one. Those who argue that it is a bad law do so on a variety of grounds—that it is sheer folly to try to change human nature by law, that such legislation can only be effective at the price of the right to privacy, that the punishment of acts arising from compelling desires is (...) cruel and excessive, that the law has no business meddling in what people do to others with their consent. Those who argue that it is a necessary law do so on one ground, that the act in question is immoral, and that what is wrong must be punished, lest the law itself fall into disrepute by failing to carry out a consistent campaign against wrong-doing. (shrink)

Appearing in the “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” as an undefined referent for the limits on freedom of expression in Islam, Shariah is still to be chased as an indefinable referent which restricts freedom of the expression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Press Law as well as Constitution unveil Shariah’s referent to be a person: the Jurist-Ruler around whom a cult of personality is legalized in terms of “Imamate” and around whom all the limits on freedom (...) of expression revolve. Interpretation of Shariah is not a solution but part of the problem in Iran. Such problem can be dealt in terms of three modes of self-expression which were invented by the Iranian Reformists to avoid self-censorship. The notion of master-signifier can be the key to unraveling the problem of self-referentiality in freedom of expression and its Reformist solution in Iran’s legal system. (shrink)

In this paper I want to examine the notion of desert, which seems to have been neglected by contemporary philosophers. Apartfrom its interest in its own right, it is important to be clear about the meaning of the word if there is to be any understanding of the idea of punishment. And that we are confused over the whole issue of punishment is obvious both from the remarks of professional philosophers and from the comments of the ‘man in the street’. (...) Because of this confusion, the discussion of any actual punishment seems to take place between two parties who never get to grips with the arguments of the other, as in the whole debate over the death penalty. To one set of people, it is obvious that the retention of hanging depends to a large extent on the question of its effectiveness in deterring murderers; to another it is equally obvious that the murderer ‘deserves’ to hang, and that there is no more to be said about the matter. Capital punishment is not a good starting-point for a discussion of punishment in general, for death is clearly unique among penalties; in addition, the topic gives rise inevitably to much sentimentality and resulting muddle-headedness. (shrink)