: This essay introduces a way of reading the Mengzi (Mencius) that complicates how we understand what Mengzi is recorded as saying. A pragmatic-strategic reading of the Mengzi is developed here, according to which Mengzi attends to and operates under important pragmatic constraints on speech. Based on a close reading of key passages, it is argued that truth-telling and descriptive accuracy are less important to Mengzi than guiding people along the Confucian path. This reading has implications for our understanding of (...) Mengzi’s philosophical positions and his methods of argumentation, as well as for our understanding of philosophical activity in general. (shrink)

Liberal democracy aims to treat all adult citizens as politically equal, at least in ideal cases: Once a citizen is over the age of majority, she is deemed a full-fledged member of the community and in theory has equal standing with all other adult citizens when it comes to making policy and participating in the political realm in general. I consider three questions: (1) Is there any plausible alternative to a standard "all adult citizens have equal political standing" model of (...) democracy that could be drawn from a specifically Confucian valuing of elder members of the community? (2) Insofar as there is a plausible alternative, what might it reveal about differences between how liberalism and Confucianism think of human selves as located in time? (3) What sort of difference would it make if the Confucian valuing of age were implemented via informal social norms, on the one hand, or via explicit institutional mechanisms and procedures, on the other? (shrink)

abstract A common bit of public political wisdom advises that in certain three‐way elections, one should cast a strategic vote for one of the top two candidates rather than a conscience‐driven vote for a third candidate, since doing otherwise amounts to ‘throwing one's vote away’. In this paper, I examine the possible justifications for this pragmatic advice to vote strategically. I argue that the most direct argument behind such advice fails to motivate strategic voting in large‐scale elections, since there is (...) no significant chance that one's own vote will alter the outcome of the election, even in plausible close‐call cases. In short, the lack of probable pragmatic effect undermines the pragmatic motivation for altering one's baseline voting behavior. However, an indirect argument succeeds in motivating strategic voting in some scenarios. Such an indirect argument relies on the possibility of one acquiring an obligation to engage in public strategic campaigning for one of the top two candidates. In many cases in which one strategically campaigns, one will, indirectly, acquire an obligation to vote strategically in accord with one's prior public campaign activities. Thus, the common bit of political wisdom about strategic voting can be justified, though only indirectly. (shrink)

abstract A common bit of public political wisdom advises that in certain three‐way elections, one should cast a strategic vote for one of the top two candidates rather than a conscience‐driven vote for a third candidate, since doing otherwise amounts to ‘throwing one's vote away’. In this paper, I examine the possible justifications for this pragmatic advice to vote strategically. I argue that the most direct argument behind such advice fails to motivate strategic voting in large‐scale elections, since there is (...) no significant chance that one's own vote will alter the outcome of the election, even in plausible close‐call cases. In short, the lack of probable pragmatic effect undermines the pragmatic motivation for altering one's baseline voting behavior. However, an indirect argument succeeds in motivating strategic voting in some scenarios. Such an indirect argument relies on the possibility of one acquiring an obligation to engage in public strategic campaigning for one of the top two candidates. In many cases in which one strategically campaigns, one will, indirectly, acquire an obligation to vote strategically in accord with one's prior public campaign activities. Thus, the common bit of political wisdom about strategic voting can be justified, though only indirectly. (shrink)

What challenges arise when attempting to incorporate body practice and meditation into undergraduate philosophy courses? In recent years, a number of philosophers have begun teaching such practices in academic classrooms, and at my university I have experimented specifically with teaching qigong, taijiquan (i.e., t’ai chi), hatha yoga, and meditation techniques in a variety of courses on East Asian and Indian philosophy. Teaching body practices and meditations poses potential problems about exclusion and advocacy in the classroom: exclusion, in the sense that (...) the practices might improperly marginalize certain students from full participation, and advocacy, in the sense that including these practices in a class might amount to problematic advocacy of a particular substantive set of religious values. This paper explores ways I have addressed these problems through a variety of pragmatic, situation-specific approaches and by encouraging students to have a sense of ownership about the practices and the learning environment itself. (shrink)

What challenges arise when attempting to incorporate body practice and meditation into undergraduate philosophy courses? In recent years, a number of philosophers have begun teaching such practices in academic classrooms, and at my university I have experimented specifically with teaching qigong, taijiquan (i.e., t’ai chi), hatha yoga, and meditation techniques in a variety of courses on East Asian and Indian philosophy. Teaching body practices and meditations poses potential problems about exclusion and advocacy in the classroom: exclusion, in the sense that (...) the practices might improperly marginalize certain students from full participation, and advocacy, in the sense that including these practices in a class might amount to problematic advocacy of a particular substantive set of religious values. This paper explores ways I have addressed these problems through a variety of pragmatic, situation-specific approaches and by encouraging students to have a sense of ownership about the practices and the learning environment itself. (shrink)

Qigong practices are contemplative body practices and meditation techniques that emerge from Chinese philosophical, medical, and martial traditions. This paper argues that qigong is a kind of embod...

Qigong practices are contemplative body practices and meditation techniques that emerge from Chinese philosophical, medical, and martial traditions. This paper argues that qigong is a kind of embod...

This chapter contains sections titled: Buddhist Backgrounds Brewing Up a Self Just a Cup of Coffee – or a Karma Macchiato?

In order to resolve problems about the normative aspects of representation without having to (1) provide a naturalized theory of intentional/semantic properties, (2) accept non-natural intentional/semantic properties into our worldview, or (3) eliminate intentionality, this article questions a basic assumption about the metaphysics of representation: that representation involves representation-objects. An alternative, nonreifying approach to the metaphysics of representation is introduced and developed in detail. The argumentative strategy is as follows. First, an adverbial view of linguistic representation is introduced. Two potential (...) objections are identified and considered. To respond to these objections, relationships between physical form and linguistic/representational form are examined. In the process, two ways of idealizing away from the heterogeneous details of actual language use are introduced: idealization toward homogeneity and idealization toward complete heterogeneity. I argue that an adverbial view of linguistic representation both allows for and requires that we idealize toward complete heterogeneity and that doing so has important implications for (1) our understanding of the relationship between physical form and representational form and (2) property attribution in general. These implications provide further indirect support for the alternative metaphysics of representation developed here. (shrink)

The Nèiyè 內業 talks of “a heart-mind within a heart-mind” that is somehow connected to or prior to language. In the context of the overall advice on looking “inward” or “internally” as part of the meditation and mysticism practice that the Nèiyè introduces, this talk of a heart-mind within a heart-mind arguably invites comparisons with a Cartesian “inner theater” conception of mentality. In this paper, I examine the “inner” talk of the Nèiyè in order to tease out its identifiable commitments (...) in philosophical psychology. I consider the ways in which the “inner” talk of the text might be read as marking out one or more of three different inner/outer distinctions, and I argue that we can consistently read the Nèiyè without seeing it as marking any inner/outer distinction that is related to what is often referred to in English as “inner experience.”. (shrink)

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is an established method for integrating values into technical design. It has been applied to different technologies and, more recently, to artificial intelligence (AI). We argue that AI poses a number of challenges specific to VSD that require a somewhat modified VSD approach. Machine learning (ML), in particular, poses two challenges. First, humans may not understand how an AI system learns certain things. This requires paying attention to values such as transparency, explicability, and accountability. Second, ML (...) may lead to AI systems adapting in ways that ‘disembody’ the values embedded in them. To address this, we propose a threefold modified VSD approach: 1) integrating a known set of VSD principles (AI4SG) as design norms from which more specific design requirements can be derived; 2) distinguishing between values that are promoted and respected by the design to ensure outcomes that not only do no harm but also contribute to good; and 3) extending the VSD process to encompass the whole life cycle of an AI technology in order to monitor unintended value consequences and redesign as needed. We illustrate our VSD for AI approach with an example use case of a SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing app. (shrink)

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his (...) contemporaries, as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries, with ancient thinkers, and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

The distinction between presentism and eternalism is usually sought in some formula like ‘Only presently existing things exist’ or ‘Past, present, and future events are equally real’. I argue that ambiguities in the copula prevent these slogans from distinguishing significant opposed positions. I suggest in addition that one can find a series of significant distinctions if one takes spacetime structure into account. These presentisms and eternalisms are not contradictory. They are complementary elements of a complete naturalistic philosophy of time.

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importance. DfV philosophies typically aim to enrol the stakeholders who may be affected by the emergence of such a (...) technology. However, regardless of which design approach is adopted, all enrolled stakeholders are human ones who propose human values. Contemporary scholarship on metahumanisms, particularly those on posthumanism, have decentred the human from its traditionally privileged position among other forms of life. Arguments that the humanist position is not (and has never been) tenable are persuasive. As such, scholarship has begun to provide a more encompassing ontology for the investigation of nonhuman values. Given the potentially transformative nature of future technologies as relates to the earth and its many assemblages, it is clear that the value investigations of these design approaches fail to account for all relevant stakeholders (i.e., nonhuman animals). This paper has two primary objectives: (1) to argue for the cogency of a posthuman ethics in the design of technologies; and (2) to describe how existing DfV approaches can begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating non-human values into design. To do this, the paper provides a rudimentary outline of what constitutes DfV approaches. It then takes up a unique design approach called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as an illustrative example. Out of all the other DfV frameworks, VSD most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design. (shrink)

Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.

Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of first-person (...) authority, the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions. (shrink)

The potential for vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for vaccination policy and ethics. In this paper, I discuss recent evidence that the current COVID-19 vaccines have only a modest and short-lived effect on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and argue that this has at least four important ethical implications. First, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be seen primarily as a self-protective choice for individuals. Second, moral condemnation of unvaccinated people for causing direct harm to others is unjustified. (...) Third, the case for a harm-based moral obligation to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is weak. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, coercive COVID-19 vaccination policies (e.g., measures that exclude unvaccinated people from society) cannot be directly justified by the harm principle. (shrink)

Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and robotics, among others, are transforming the field of manufacturing and industry as a whole in unprecedent ways. This fourth industrial revolution is consequentially changing how operators that have been crucial to industry success go about their practices in industrial environments. This short paper briefly introduces the notion of the Operator 4.0 as well as how this novel way of conceptualizing the human operator necessarily implicates human values in (...) the technologies that constitute it. Similarly, the design methodology known as value sensitive design (VSD) is drawn upon to discuss how these Operator 4.0 technologies can be design for human values and, conversely, how a potential value-sensitive Operator 4.0 can be used to strengthen the VSD methodology in developing novel technologies. (shrink)

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS), sometimes referred to as “killer robots”, are receiving evermore attention, both in public discourse as well as by scholars and policymakers. Much of this interest is connected with emerging ethical and legal problems linked to increasing autonomy in weapons systems, but there is a general underappreciation for the ways in which existing law might impact on these new technologies. In this paper, we argue that as AWS become more sophisticated and increasingly more capable than flesh-and-blood soldiers, (...) it will increasingly be the case that such soldiers are “in the power” of those AWS which fight against them. This implies that such soldiers ought to be considered hors de combat, and not targeted. In arguing for this point, we draw out a broader conclusion regarding hors de combat status, namely that it must be viewed contextually, with close reference to the capabilities of combatants on both sides of any discreet engagement. Given this point, and the fact that AWS may come in many shapes and sizes, and can be made for many different missions, we argue that each particular AWS will likely need its own standard for when enemy soldiers are deemed hors de combat. We conclude by examining how these nuanced views of hors de combat status might impact on meaningful human control of AWS. (shrink)

Ce livre presente une investigation critique de la science generale de l'etre, instituee par Aristote au titre de la science de l'etant en tant qu'etant. L'auteur met en lumiere ce qu'est l'etre pour Aristote, ce que signifie precisement le type d'unite de ses significations multiples, et quelles sont les structures, principes et concepts epistemologiques par lesquels le reel peut etre explique dans son ensemble. L'originalite aristotelicienne qui se revele dans son apprehension horizontale du reel, est a la fois responsable de (...) son naufrage historique dans l'ocean dominant des pensees hierarchisantes, et de son renouveau axtremement stimulant pour la pensee actuelle. (shrink)

Plato Plato (427-347 BC) is surely the most famous of all philosophers. Little is known of his early life, except that he was born into a noble Athenian ...

Adequate epistemic justification is best conceived as the appearance, over time, of knowledge to the subject. ‘Appearance’ is intended literally, not as a synonym for belief. It is argued through consideration of examples that this account gets the extension of ‘adequately justified belief’ at least roughly correct. A more theoretical reason is then offered to regard justification as the appearance of knowledge: If we have a knowledge norm for assertion, we do our best to comply with this norm when we (...) express as assertions only beliefs that appear to us to be knowledge. If we are doing our best, there is little point in further sanctions. So a norm of knowledge for assertion would lead to a secondary norm of justified belief as the appearance of knowledge, marking a point at which our assertions may be corrected but should not be blamed. (shrink)

What are the inherent claims that lie at the core of religion? Which of them are defensible by reason, and which are not? Potential answers to these questions and more, from influential philosophers past and present, may be found in this short book edited by Steven M. Cahn. Featuring fifty-two classic and contemporary readings, Exploring Philosophy of Religion: Text and Readings is a topically-organized anthology that presents broad coverage of seven major areas in the philosophy of religion - the (...) concept of God, the existence of God, religious language, miracles and mysticism, belief in God, resurrection and immortality, and religious pluralism - in a clear and accessible format. With guiding introductory material from Professor Cahn, each of the readings has been carefully selected and edited for maximum clarity and comprehensiveness; only the most essential material is included. To further foster understanding, the text also features an appendix consisting of Professor Cahn's monograph, God, Reason, and Religion, which provides a synthesis and interpretation of the crucial issues raised throughout the readings. (shrink)

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also arguably the most radical and controversial. This was the first complete biography of Spinoza in any language and is based on detailed archival research. More than simply recounting the story of Spinoza's life, the book takes the reader right into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, right into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual (...) and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. Though the book will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, historians, and scholars of Jewish thought, it has been written for any member of the general reading public with a serious interest in philosophy, Jewish history, seventeenth-century European history, and the culture of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinoza: A Life has recently been awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed the mass distribution and adoption of smart home systems and devices powered by artificial intelligence systems ranging from household appliances like fridges and toasters to more background systems such as air and water quality controllers. The pervasiveness of these sociotechnical systems makes analyzing their ethical implications necessary during the design phases of these devices to ensure not only sociotechnical resilience, but to design them for human values in mind and thus preserve meaningful human control over (...) them. This paper engages in a conceptual investigations of how meaningful human control over smart home devices can be attained through design. The value sensitive design (VSD) approach is proposed as a way of attaining this level of control. In the proposed framework, values are identified and defined, stakeholder groups are investigated and brought into the design process and the technical constraints of the technologies in question are considered. The paper concludes with some initial examples that illustrate a more adoptable way forward for both ethicists and engineers of smart home devices. (shrink)

A study both of the aims of education and the appropriate means of achieving those aims. It is suitable for courses in philosophy of education, foundations of education and the history of ideas.

This is the first detailed study to explore the little-understood notions of "knowing who someone is," "knowing a person's identity," and related locutions. It locates these notions within the context of a general theory of believing and a semantical theory of belief- and knowledge-ascriptions.The books's main contention is that what one knows, when one knows who someone is, is not normally an identity in the numerical sense of "a = b," but rather a certain sort of predication to know who (...) someone is is just to know that that person is F, where "F" is a predicate that is "important," in a technical sense defined by the authors, for the purposes determined by context. Their book offers a rigorous formal semantics for ascriptions of knowing and of knowing-who in particular, solving such well-known problems and paradoxes as Kripke's Puzzle, and Quines difficulties with de re belief, along the way.The authors apply their analysis to each of several important issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethical theory in which the previously unexamined notion of "knowing who" has loomed large-the mechanics of linguistic referring, the foundations of epistemic logic, problems of self-knowledge and self-regarding belief, universalizability and "Golden Rule" arguments in ethics, and moral "personalism" versus "impartialism."Stephen Boër is Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. William Lycan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina and author of Logical Form in Natural Language. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

An introduction to and critique of the latest trends in critical theory.

Released in 1984, Steven E. Rhoads' classic was considered by many to be among the best introductions to the economic way of thinking and its applications. This anniversary edition has been updated to account for political and economic developments - from the greater interest in redistributing income and the ascendancy of behaviorism to the Trump presidency. Rhoads explores opportunity cost, marginalism, and economic incentives and explains why mainstream economists - even those well to the left - still value free (...) markets. He critiques economics for its unbalanced emphasis on narrow self-interest as controlling motive and route to happiness, highlighting philosophers and positive psychologists' findings that happiness is far more dependent on friends and family than on income or wealth. This thought-provoking tour of the economist's mind is a must read for our times, providing a clear, lively, non-technical insight into how economists think and why they shouldn't be ignored. (shrink)

Winner of 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize In a penetrating and lucid discussion of the enigmatic relationship between the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Steven Galt Crowell proposes that the distinguishing feature of twentieth-century philosophy is not so much its emphasis on language as its concern with meaning. Arguing that transcendental phenomenology is indispensable to the philosophical explanation of the space of meaning, Crowell shows how a proper understanding of both Husserl and Heidegger reveals the distinctive contributions (...) of each to that ongoing phenomenological project. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore and examine what hermeneutic methods can and should be summoned in order to interpret critically an intriguing yet endlessly puzzling sentence in the “Genjōkōan” (現成公案) fascicle of Sōtō sect founder Dōgen’s (道元, 1200–1253) Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵). The source material deals with the way perspectives shift dramatically “when riding a boat out to sea, where mountains can no longer be seen (yamanaki kaichū 山なき海中)”? The analogy of sailing past the horizon, so that any trace (...) of land is not visible, and one feels temporarily encircled by the ocean with no other frame of reference available, raises key phenomenological issues regarding the innate partiality or insufficiency of human perception in connection to the Zen goal of awakening to a holistic standpoint that is devoid of divisibility but incorporates an array of standpoints. This passage has been interpreted in diverse ways since the time of early medieval commentaries by Senne and Kyōgō and by Edo-period Sōtō scholiasts, as well as in modern times by various Japanese philosophers and researchers of Dōgen’s texts. (shrink)

How do minds emerge from developing brains? According to the representational features of cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity. Contrary to popular selectionist models that emphasize regressive mechanisms, the neurobiological evidence suggests that this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of cortex. The interaction between the environment and neural growth results in a flexible type of learning: minimizes the need for prespecification in accordance with recent neurobiological evidence (...) that the developing cerebral cortex is largely free of domain-specific structure. Instead, the representational properties of cortex are built by the nature of the problem domain confronting it. This uniquely powerful and general learning strategy undermines the central assumption of classical learnability theory, that the learning properties of a system can be deduced from a fixed computational architecture. Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of neocortex in mammals is a progression toward more flexible representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits. Human cortical postnatal development is also more extensive and protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has evolved so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure to shape its structure and function through constructive learning. (shrink)

In recent years an uneasy peace has descended in U.S. academe between those who feel research universities have done too little to advance the representation of minority groups and women and those who feel that the administrative policies developed to improve representation can and sometimes do come into conflict with core intellectual commitments of universities. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from interviews with 47 natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics faculty members at a U.S. research university, the paper examines the background (...) characteristics of three sets of protagonists - academic progressives, academic traditionalists, and those whose views bridge the divide - and the way respondents discussed and justified their viewpoints. The paper draws on the theory of strategic action fields to illuminate the structure and dynamics of the conflict and suggests modifications to the theory that would improve its explanatory power for this case. (shrink)

From Plato's Ion to works by contemporary philosophers, this anthology showcases classic texts to illuminate the development of philosophical thought about art and the aesthetic. This volume is the most comprehensive collection of readings on aesthetics and the philosophy of art currently available.

The beginning of the journey -- What this book is about : using ideas from mathematics, economics, and physics to tackle the big questions in philosophy : what is real? what can we know? what is the difference between right and wrong? and how should we live? -- Reality and unreality -- On what there is -- Why is there something instead of nothing? the best answer I have : mathematics exists because it must and everything else exists because it (...) is made of mathematics, with an excursion into artificial intelligence -- Unfinished business -- Unfinished business from chapter two : the nature and purpose of economic models -- How Richard Dawkins got it wrong -- Why Dawkins's argument against intelligent design can't be right and a mathematical analysis of the arguments for the existence of God -- Belief -- Daydream believers -- Most beliefs are ill-considered because most false beliefs are costless to hold -- The next several chapters will explore the consequences of this observation before we return to the question of where our beliefs and knowledge come from -- Unfinished business -- Unfinished business from the preceding chapter : how color vision works, sound, and water waves, the sheer craziness of economic protectionism -- Do believers believe? -- Our ill-considered beliefs about religion : why I believe that almost nobody is deeply religious -- On what there obviously is -- Our ill-considered beliefs about free will, ESP, and life after death -- Diogenes's nightmare -- How is legitimate disagreement possible if you're arguing with someone who is as intelligent and informed as you are, shouldn't you put just as much weight on your opponent's arguments as your own? -- The fact that we persist in disagreeing is strong evidence that we don't really care what's true -- Knowledge -- Knowing your math -- Where mathematical knowledge comes from and logic and why evidence and logic are not enough -- Unfinished business -- Unfinished business from the preceding chapter : the tale of hercules and the hydra, with an excursion into the lore of very large numbers -- Incomplete thinking -- Godel's incompleteness theorem and what it doesn't say about the limits of human knowledge -- The rules of logic and the tale of a Potbellied pig -- The power of logical thought, with excursions into the most counterintuitive theorem in all of mathematics and the tale of a potbellied pig -- The rules of evidence -- What we can and can't learn from evidence, with excursions into the value of preschool and how internet porn prevents rape -- The limits to knowledge -- What physics does and doesn't tell us about what we can and cannot know -- Understanding Heisenberg's uncertainty principle -- Unfinished business -- The oddness of the quantum world and why it matters to game theorists -- Right and wrong -- Telling right from wrong -- Some hard questions about right and wrong and about life and death -- The economist's golden rule -- A rule of thumb for good behavior -- How to be socially responsible -- Putting the rule of thumb into practice -- On not being a jerk -- Goofus and gallant on immigration policy -- The economist on the playground -- Our ill-considered beliefs about fairness in the market place and in the voting booth, contrasted with our carefully considered beliefs about fairness on the playground -- Unfinished business -- How ancient talmudic scholars anticipated modern economic theory -- The life of the mind -- How to think -- Some basic rules for clear thinking, mostly about economics, but also about arithmetic, neurobiology, sin, and eschewing blather -- What to study -- Advice to college students : stay away from the English department and approach the philosophy department with caution, with an excursion into the remarkable life of Frank Ramsey. (shrink)

How can we take history seriously as real and relevant? Despite the hazards of politically dangerous or misleading accounts of the past, we live our lives in a great network of cooperation with other actors; past, present, and future. We study and reflect on the past as a way of exercising a responsibility for shared action. In each of the chapters of Full History Smith poses a key question about history as a concern for conscious participants in the sharing of (...) action, starting with “What Is Historical Meaningfulness?” and ending with “How Can History Have an Aim?” Constructing new models of historical meaning while engaging critically with perspectives offered by Ranke, Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Eliade, Sartre, Foucault, and Arendt, Smith develops a philosophical account of thinking about history that moves beyond postmodernist skepticism. Full History seeks to expand the cast of significant actors, establishing an inclusive version of the historical that recognizes large-scale cumulative actions but also encourages critical revision and expansion of any paradigm of shared action. (shrink)

Preface -- Why political philosophy? -- Antigone and the politics of conflict -- Socrates and the examined life -- Plato on justice and the human good -- Aristotle's science of regime politics -- The politics of the Bible -- Machiavelli and the art of political founding -- Hobbes's new science of politics -- Locke and the art of constitutional government -- Rousseau on civilization and its discontents -- Tocqueville and the dilemmas of democracy -- In defense of patriotism.