On the one hand, after Matteo d'Acquasparta's distinction between the three types of eternity and the temporal necessity of the past, Meyronnes radicalized Scotus's dynamic vision of duration, conceiving the modality as a relation of implication between predicate and existing subject, and time as relationship between Creator and creature. On the other hand, after Ockham denied the real simultaneity of opposed potencies, the Ochamist extension of temporal necessity to the present was denied by Gregory of Rimini, who was favourable, together (...) with Wodeham, to the mutability of the past in a divided sense. Mirecourt, strong on the English subtleties, appears to follow Gregory and tries to find a solution to the interaction between the two contingencies, from top to bottom, which had been formalized by Gregory: if I, performing or not performing X, can act as if God, as the supreme intellect from eternity, could have known or not known X to come, and, if God as agent, absolutely willing omnipotent and unimpeadable from eternity can act as if X happened or did not happen, then can I act as if X, which is from eternity, did not happen from eternity? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Le prime quattro Collationes Parisienses sulle tracce di Giovanni Duns ScotoFrancesco Fiorentino (bio)Come si è visto altrove, l'attribuzione delle Collationes è abbastanza dubbia, propriamente parlando: questa opera non può essere ricondotta a Giovanni Duns Scoto in quanto autore secondo i concetti moderni di proprietà intellettuale e di responsabilità privata, che non risultano pertinenti ai processi materiali di produzione del libro tardo-medievale in quanto opera collettiva, fondata sulla co-autorialità (...) distribuita tra maestro in quanto ideatore e apprendista in quanto compilatore. Questa impossibilità consegue al genere letterario delle Collationes in quanto esercitazioni baccellierali o studentesche, sotto la supervisione di un magister studentium.1 I contemporanei a Scoto non rispettavano i criteri filologici del Terzo Millennio al punto da includere, nel corpus scotiano, il primo libro del commento sentenziario di Enrico di Harclay secondo la redazione del ms. Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 13687.2Tuttavia, la considerazione di questi fattori materiali non svaluta né le Collationes che attestano l'esistenza di un ambiente culturale, prossimo a Scoto, né lo stesso Scoto che ha probabilmente partecipato alle Collationes come moderatore o come interlocutore.3 Questa particolare natura delle Collationes ne condiziona l'attribuzione che non può essere associata con la ricerca dell'autore in senso stretto, ma con la considerazione di un plesso di opinioni concorrenti e risalenti all'insegnamento [End Page 115] di Scoto, non sempre in prima scena.4 Scoto, in cinque luoghi testuali dell'Ordinatio, si riferisce apertamente alle Collationes che sono incluse in un discreto numero di testimoni manoscritti del trecento e del quattrocento che tramandano opere sicuramente scotiane, e nella Tabula Scoti redatta da Giacomo d'Ascoli. Guglielmo di Alnwick si dichiara reportator di una collatio, presumibilmente di Parigi, sulla connessione delle virtù morali.5Queste evidenze consentono d'inserire le Collationes nel corpus scotiano, secondo un grado di autenticità significativo, ma non perfettamente conforme ai criteri filologici attuali. Ciò non significa de virtute sermonis che le Collationes sono di Scoto o che non sono di Scoto, ma, più precisamente, che le Collationes non possono essere attribuite a Scoto secondo i criteri filologici attuali, pur avendo avuto buona probabilità di essere attribuite a Scoto dai suoi contemporanei secondo i loro specifici criteri filologici. Infatti è la cornice che dà significato al quadro, è l'orizzonte che dà senso al paesaggio, è la forma che fa la sostanza. Queste ultime annotazioni apparentemente erudite potrebbero risultare scomode per un eventuale progetto di edizione critica che volesse sostenere una stretta autorialità scotiana delle Collationes. Sarebbe più saggio mantenere l'anonimato dell'opera nel rispetto del rigore scientifico sperimentale.A seconda del luogo in cui queste conferenze sono state svolte, ossia Parigi o Oxford, le Collationes sono state distinte in Parisienses e Oxonienses. Queste ultime sono state edite da Marina Fedeli e Guido Alliney.6 Alliney e Fedeli hanno messo in luce la natura, la tradizione, la datazione, l'attribuzione e i contenuti storico-dottrinali di tutte le Collationes, incluse quelle di Parigi.Le Collationes Parisienses sono conservate in sette testimoni manoscritti già descritti da Carlo Balic, Guido Alliney, Marina Fedeli e Franz Pelster7: [End Page 116]Cambridge, Peterhouse College, MS 241, fols. 1r–45r;London, British Library, Add MS 7696, fols. 2r–38v;Cittá Vaticana, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 876, fols. 311r–323v;Oxford, Balliol College, MS 209, fols. 114r–141v;Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 194, fols. 2v–20v;Oxford, Merton College, MS 65, fols. 90r–109v;Oxford, Merton College, MS 90, fols. 155r–199VQuesti testimoni sembrano essere distribuiti in due redazioni distinte: l'una completa e l'altra incompleta. La prima appare tramandata dai primi due testimoni, entrambi risalenti al secolo XV, mentre la seconda redazione si trova negli altri testimoni di cui solo il ms. Vat. lat. 876 data al secolo XIV. A questi testimoni occorre aggiungere altri due: il ms. Cittá Vaticana, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 890, fols. 4v–5v che contiene solo un estratto, e il ms. Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona d'Aragó, ms. Ripoll 95, ff. 35r–37r che custodisce solo la prima collatio di Parigi.8Le Collationes Parisienses si dividono almeno in quattro gruppi: il primo gruppo, dalla prima alla quarta collatio, verte sulle virtù morali... (shrink)

La vita e le opere di Landolfo Caracciolo O.F.M. sono state descritte in modo sistematico da Salerno.1 Rispetto a questa descrizione, che ha posto il bacellierato sentenziario di Caracciolo intorno al 1320, va assunta la ricostruzione di Schabel, che ha spiegato come Caracciolo abbia letto le Sententiae a Parigi dopo Pietro Aureolo e prima di Francesco d’Ascoli e Francesco di Meyronnes.2 Successivamente Landolfo avrebbe ricevuto la prima cattedra in teologia dello Studium fran-cescano di Napoli, inaugurandovi la tradizione scotista.3Landolfo (...) fu ministro provinciale della Terra di Lavoro e svolse parecchie missioni diplomatiche per conto della regina Giovanna I di Napoli. Nel 1327 fu designato vescovo di.. (shrink)

M. Leone / L. Valente, Libertà e determinismo. Riflessioni medievali, Aracne, Roma 2017.

This article presents the recent edition which the research team, direct-ed by Olivier Bertrand, undertook in order to give back to the schol-arly community concerned with Augustine of Hippo the translation, in Middle French, by Raoul de Presles of De civitate Dei commissioned by Charles V, the Good, King of France, while he was involved in the recapture of Brittany after the Treaty of Bretigny dur-ing the Hundred Years’ War. This translation, which originally enjoyed an enormous market success, has finally (...) appeared in a critical edition consisting of five volumes. Until now, only the first two volumes have been available, containing, respectively, books I-III and IV-V. (shrink)

The fallen state of man is characterized by the disappearance of wisdom and the lack of freedom, according to Ugo and the anonymous author of Summa Sententiarum. Ugo assimilates this person to the insipid and stupid in the book of Job. Such a person should blend infused wisdom with the triple cognition of God, himself and the good to be done. This task follows a precise historical development, which is initiated by the weak in faith and which can be schematized (...) in five steps: 1) fear; 2) education; 3) wisdom; 4) history; 5) study of the Bible. Studying, man assimilates himself to God as the supreme exemplary form of wisdom and individualizes the works of condition and reparation. But whereas the anonymous author subdues the moral value of divine action to a social criterion, Ugo distinguishes three degrees of good and connects moral value to the activity or passivity of the divine will. (shrink)

Come ho osservato altrove2, il ms. Oxford, Merton, 284 è composito: consiste di 117 fogli prevalentemente cartacei, tranne i primi quattro di guardia e i ff. 112–113, che sono pergamenacei. Esso misura mediamente 287 × 223 mm3. L’esame della filigrana attesta la produzione delle carte a Siena intorno al 13404. Sul verso della terza carta di guardia si trova una nota marginale che denuncia l’origine e il possesso del codice, ossia «Liber Iohannis Bloxham ex legat’ M. Symonis Lamborne / Iste (...) liber datur domui scolarium de Merton’ in Oxon’ ad iacendum in libraria incatenatum quamdiu durare poterit ad usum et utilitatem sociorum eiusdem domus et dabatur dicto Iohanni superius nominato per magistrum Symonum... (shrink)

Pietro Pomponazzi.--Simnoe Porzio.--Maria d'Aragona marchesa del Vasto.--Andrea Cesalpino.--Giovan Battista de la Porta.--Giordano Bruno.--Tommaso Campanella.--Giulio Cesare Vanini.--Trajano Boccalini.

Alnwick distances himself from Scotus, as he appears in Lectura Oxoniensis and the commentary on Metaphysics, though the natural propensity of the will is affirmed in q. 9 d. 49 of Book Four of Reportata Parisiensia. However, this question could be spurious, or else more susceptible to the Parisian influence of teaching of Henry of Ghent, with whom Alnwick aligns himself when he sanctions without any doubt the fact that man desires to pass from a lesser good, guaranteed by philosophical (...) speculation of an Aristotelian- Averroist matrix, to a supreme good, which coincides with the clear vision of divine essence, because man knows that essence both naturaliter and supernaturaliter. Alnwick tenaciously debates natural knowledge in the prologue to the Commentary on the Sentences, thanks to the use of discursus, which serves to set up a chain of syllogistic deductions in order to arrive at quidditative concepts of divinity in both an affirmative and negative sense. These concepts assure the wayfarer a general k... (shrink)

This volume contains the Latin-Italian translation of the Ordinatio Prologue of John Duns Scotus. It is the second volume in the series 'Traditiones: Testi del pensiero tardo-antico, medieval e umanistico', directed by Armando Bisogno. While it is not the first Italian translation of the Ordinatio Prologue, it does offer a rich and detailed introduction that situates Scotus's text in the more general context of his historical milieu, including the effects of the Condemnation of 1277. After a general overview of the (...) life and works of Scotus, including his major positions, the author aids the reader in understanding the significance of Scotus's predecessors... (shrink)

Questo Congresso è nato in occasione del Settimo Centenario della morte del beato Giovanni Duns Scoto, uno dei pensatori più infleunti ed innovativi della Grande Scolastica. Il Congresso conmdensa molti studi ed edizioni di importanti studiosi nazionali ed internazionali, che vertono sulle principali tematiche del pensiero scotista es sull'erdità di scoto. Questa eridità è alquanto complessa e meritvole di approfondimento, perché riserva sorprese inaspettate. Essa è considerata secondo due criteri: uno temporale e l'altro spaziale. Secondo il criterio temporale il Congresso (...) spazia dal secolo XIV all'epoca contemporanea, mentre il criterio spaziale restringe il Congresso al Mezzogiorno d'Italia. (shrink)

Nel Tesoro del Duomo di Monza si conservano tre celebri dittici eburnei relativi alla dotazione di suppellettili liturgiche di Berengario del Friuli (inizi X secolo): il dittico di Stilicone e quello del Poeta e della Musa, entrambi tardo antichi; il dittico di re Davide e san Gregorio Magno, di datazione e lettura più controverse (VI secolo ed età carolingia). Primo editore dei pezzi è Anton Francesco Gori nel secondo volume del Thesaurus veterum diptychorum consularium et ecclesiasticorum (1759), corredato di (...) tre tavole di Andrea Scacciati. Pur non avendo mai visionato i manufatti, l’erudito fiorentino dedica ad essi un’ampia disamina critica basandosi essenzialmente sugli acquerelli del pittore Girolamo Ferroni, reclutato dal marchese milanese e prezioso intermediario Alessandro Teodoro Trivulzio. Nel 1794 il padre della storiografia monzese, il canonico Anton Francesco Frisi, risolve di rieditare i dittici in apertura del terzo tomo delle sue Memorie storiche di Monza e sua corte. Consigliato da quel don Carlo Trivulzio erudito e proprietario di un ricco nucleo di avori antichi, supportato dalle modeste incisioni di Giulio Cesare Bianchi, offre una rilettura che puntualizza ed emenda in parte quanto scritto dal Gori, condita da una vena polemica contro «chi non ha esaminati personalmente i Monumenti, sui quali ragiona». Sullo sfondo del contesto culturale dell’epoca e delle personalità che vi presero parte, con l’ausilio della documentazione divisa tra la Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, l’Archivio della Fondazione Trivulzio e la Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze, il contributo intende proporre una ricostruzione degli avvenimenti con attenzione al rapporto tra originale (i dittici monzesi) e copia (disegni e incisioni che ne scaturirono). (shrink)

The title of this paper is inspired by the book edited by Domenico Fiormonte entitled Canoni liquidi (Liquid Canons). Of course, the adjective “liquid” refers to Zygmunt Bauman’s term at which my critique is also indirectly aimed. The title of Fiormonte’s book seems to suggest equivalence between textual “mobility” and “liquidity.” Yet the “liquefying” of (literary) canons and the emergence of new intrinsically kinetic or fluid forms of mobile textuality requires a critical assessment that does not prematurely celebrate the funeral (...) of the text as we know it but pays close attention to what seems to be waiting for us beyond the text, as suggested in Francesco Fiorentino’s recent edited volume. This means paying attention to what in my recent book, Il futuro della letteratura (The Future of Literature), I call digital incunabula: objects/textual tools, devices programmed in a twofold, reciprocal sense, whose linguistic properties and rules interact and interfere with the algorithmic procedures of artificial languages. In this programmed and programmable interaction and intermediation one can perceive the horizon of incomprehensibility of posthuman language, providing a new aporetic dimension to Gadamer’s assertion that “the being that can be understood is language.“ This assertion is by now the most significant issue in the horizon of literary (digital) arts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:This review essay has been inspired by Francesco Fiorentino's 2006 study Libertà e contingenza nel pensiero tardomedievale, which provides a detailed analysis and an edition of the 38th distinction of Francis of Meyronnes' 'Conflatus' . As with some of his earlier articles and book-length studies on Gregory of Rimini and other early fourteenth-century figures, Fiorentino grapples in this book with some central theological issues in the (...) decades after Scotus's teachings in Paris, namely the relation between God as omniscient and omnipotent creator and his contingent creation, and the reconciliation between God's foreknowledge and human freedom.There is a general understanding among specialists of late medieval Franciscan thought that the teachings of Scotus at Oxford and Paris had formed a watershed in dealing with these issues, and that most Franciscan theologians after Scotus took his teachings as a major point of departure. Yet the latest research indicates that this did not mean a slavish adherence to the Doctor Subtilis. The detailed studies and editions that are currently appearing show that we are confronted by significant independent masters, able to follow the depths of Scotus's arguments but willing to develop their own stance within the debates of their time.Francis of Meyronnes is without doubt one of the more important Franciscan theologians in this very period. As his name already indicates, he was born in Meyronnes , in a family that maintained close contacts with the Anjou dynasty . Francis joined the Franciscan Order at Digne , and received an education in logic and philosophy before he was allowed to pursue a lectorate course at the Paris studium generale , where he became acquainted with the theology of Scotus.After his studies to become a lector, he taught between 1307 and 1320 as a lecturer's assistant and as a philosophy and theology lector in consecutive assignments in the schools of the custody and in provincial studia in the French and Italian provinces of the Order. He also fulfilled in this period a stint as Custos of the Sisteron custody. Based on his teaching performance, which would have included philosophical teachings as well as a series of lectures on the Sentences of Lombard pro exercitio in the provincial school network, he was allowed to return to Paris to read the Sentences pro gradu between 1320-1322. Immediately following these Sentences lectures, Francis completed the obligatory post-sentential exercises through participation in a number of disputed and quodlibetal questions , in order to become eligible for the magisterium with the licentia ubique docendi. During this period between his Sentences lectures pro gradu and his promotion, he worked towards an edited version of his Sentences commentary and published some of his works on Augustine's De Trinitate, as well as several other texts related to his teaching and disputation activities.Francis was able to build on his family connections with the house of Anjou. This showed for example in his contacts with Elzéar of Sabran, preceptor of King Robert of Naples . Either through Francis's contacts with Elzéar or directly, King Robert obtained a sufficiently high opinion of Francis to sponsor his promotion to the magisterium theologiae. At the King's instigation, Pope John XXII wrote a papal letter to the chancellor of the University of Paris on 24 May 1323, asking him to bestow on Francis "the license to teach everywhere" . Thus, Francis became a magister bullatus. Yet it is a bit unfair to suggest, to quote Francesco Fiorentino, that he received the doctorate "secondo l'uso dell'epoca, senza alcun concorso competitivo." The procedure of.. (shrink)

This paper dialogues with the contributions included in Francesco Fiorentino and Domenico Firomonte’s edited volumes and Massimo Riva’s book from the point of view of feminist literary criticism. This diverse positioning in relation to the work of women writers has allowed feminist criticism to develop a path that has deconstructed the Italian literary canon and the promotion of critical stances that are no longer abstract or monologic, but rather situated in the point of view of the subject and (...) its relational component. Works by Italian women writers present themselves as a body of texts of high material density that transfer questions of textual mobility both within digital and print culture onto the subject and its style of enunciation. L’intervento dialoga con i contributi dei volumi a cura di Francesco Fiorentino e Domenico Fiormonte e con il libro di Massimo Riva a partire dall’esperienza della critica letteraria femminista italiana. Il suo diverso posizionamento rispetto alle opere delle scrittrici ha permesso l’articolarsi di un percorso che ha decostruito il canone della tradizione letteraria italiana e l’affermarsi di posizioni critiche non più astratte e monologiche, ma situate a partire dal soggetto e dalla sua componente relazionale. Le opere delle scrittrici italiane si rappresentano infatti come un corpo testuale dall’alta densità materica, che sposta sul soggetto e sul suo stile dell’enunciazione le questioni di mobilità del testo, sia esso virtuale o cartaceo. (shrink)

Recent debates on the nature of preferences in economics have typically assumed that they are to be interpreted either as behavioural regularities or as mental states. In this paper I challenge this dichotomy and argue that neither interpretation is consistent with scientific practice in choice theory and behavioural economics. Preferences are belief-dependent dispositions with a multiply realizable causal basis, which explains why economists are reluctant to make a commitment about their interpretation.

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning (...) the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free-riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a “narrow” and a “wide” reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in “real-world” situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation “in the wild.” In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing. (shrink)

Experimental “localism” stresses the importance of context‐specific knowledge, and the limitations of universal theories in science. I illustrate Latour's radical approach to localism and show that it has some unpalatable consequences, in particular the suggestion that problems of external validity (or how to generalize experimental results to nonlaboratory circumstances) cannot be solved. In the last part of the paper I try to sketch a solution to the problem of external validity by extending Mayo's error‐probabilistic approach.

The paper discusses some formal difficulties concerning the theory of universals of Trope-Only ontologies, from which the formal theory of predication advanced by Trope-Only theorists seems to be irremediably affected. It is impossible to lay out a successful defense of a Trope-Only theory without Russellian types, but such types are ontologically inconsistent with tropes’ nominalism. Historically, Tropists’ first way to avoid the problem is appealing to the supervenience claim, which however fails on its terms and, thus, fails as a ground (...) for a solution to the higher-order or ‘type’ problem. A later solution involves the invariance of primitive equivalence relations in order to make universals ontologically innocuous. However, I argue that this latter solution fails to meet the requirements imposed on an ontologically unbiased nominalist attitude. So, this paper discusses how Trope-Only theories alter standard formal moves in Nominalism, and also is interested in clarifying further the formal assumptions for these problems. (shrink)

Comparative process tracing is the best analysis of extrapolation inferences in the philosophical and scientific literature so far. In this essay I examine some similarities and differences between comparative process tracing and former attempts to capture the logic of extrapolation, such as the analogical approach. I show that these accounts are not different in spirit, although comparative process tracing supersedes previous proposals in terms of analytical detail. I also examine some qualms about the possibility of drawing extrapolation inferences in the (...) social sciences and conclude by suggesting that there may be cases of extrapolation without process tracing. (shrink)

opinionated survey paper to be published in the Blackwell’s Philosophy Compass.

Thaler and Sunstein justify nudge policies from welfaristic premises: nudges are acceptable because they benefit the individuals who are nudged. A tacit assumption behind this strategy is that we can identify the true preferences of decision-makers. We argue that this assumption is often unwarranted, and that as a consequence nudge policies must be justified in a different way. A possible strategy is to abandon welfarism and endorse genuine paternalism. Another one is to argue that the biases of decision that choice (...) architects attempt to eliminate create externalities. For example, in the case of intertemporal discounting, the costs of preference reversals are not always paid by the discounters, because they are transferred onto other individuals. But if this is the case, then nudges are best justified from a political rather than welfaristic standpoint. (shrink)

The answer in a nutshell is: Yes, five years ago, but nobody has noticed. Nobody noticed because the majority of social scientists subscribe to one of the following views: (1) the ‘anomalous’ behaviour observed in standard prisoner’s dilemma or ultimatum game experiments has refuted standard game theory a long time ago; (2) game theory is flexible enough to accommodate any observed choices by ‘refining’ players’ preferences; or (3) it is just a piece of pure mathematics (a tautology). None of these (...) views is correct. This paper defends the view that GT as commonly understood is not a tautology, that it suffers from important (albeit very recently discovered) empirical anomalies, and that it is not flexible enough to accommodate all the anomalies in its theoretical framework. It also discusses the experiments that finally refuted game theory, and concludes trying to explain why it took so long for experimental game theorists to design experiments that could adequately test the theory. (shrink)

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning (...) the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free-riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a “narrow” and a “wide” reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in “real-world” situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation “in the wild.” In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing. (shrink)

The notion of multi-functional kind is introduced to explain how social scientists may be able to draw inferences across historically unrelated societies or cultures. Multi-functional kinds are neither eternal nor purely historical, support non-trivial inductive generalisations, and allow to overcome scepticism about the inductive potential of multiply realised (functional) properties. Two examples, from monetary economics and anthropology, provide support for a pluralistic ontology of the social world.

The auctions of the Federal Communication Commission, designed in 1994 to sell spectrum licences, are one of the few widely acclaimed and copied cases of economic engineering to date. This paper includes a detailed narrative of the process of designing, testing and implementing the FCC auctions, focusing in particular on the role played by game theoretical modelling and laboratory experimentation. Some general remarks about the scope, interpretation and use of rational choice models open and conclude the paper.

David Lewis famously proposed to model conventions as solutions to coordination games, where equilibrium selection is driven by precedence, or the history of play. A characteristic feature of Lewis Conventions is that they are intrinsically non-normative. Some philosophers have argued that for this reason they miss a crucial aspect of our folk notion of convention. It is doubtful however that Lewis was merely analysing a folk concept. I illustrate how his theory can (and must) be assessed using empirical data, and (...) argue that it does indeed miss an important aspect of real-world conventions. (shrink)

The Ultimatum Game is one of the most successful experimental designs in the history of the social sciences. In this article I try to explain this success—what makes it a “paradigmatic experiment”—stressing in particular its versatility. Despite the intentions of its inventors, the Ultimatum Game was never a good design to test economic theory, and it is now mostly used as a heuristic tool for the observation of nonstandard preferences or as a “social thermometer” for the observation of culture‐specific norms. (...) †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Exeter EX4 4DT, UK; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The connection between economics and ethics is as old as economics itself, and central to both disciplines. It is an issue that has recently attracted much interest from economists and philosophers. The connection is, in part, a result of the desire of economists to make policy prescriptions, which clearly require some normative criteria. More deeply, much economic theory is founded on the assumption of utility maximization, thereby creating an immediate connection between the foundations of economics and the philosophical literature on (...) utilitarianism and reasons for action. In fact, some influential contemporary approaches to ethics advocate decision-theoretic or game-theoretic foundations of some sort for moral principles, while several economic theorists are now prepared to take into account the ethical dimensions of rational decisions. As a result, it appears that economics and ethics are somehow inextricably linked through theories of rational decision-making. Most of us would probably find it disturbing to concede that there are contradictions between the prescriptions of rationality and the requirements of moral `rightness'. The essays included in the present volume provide a detailed analysis of the connections between ethics and economics as viewed from several different - sometimes conflicting - perspectives. This book, the outcome of a joint meeting of philosophers and economists, has three main themes: the validity of utilitarianism much used by economists, the notion of fairness and equity, and the coherence of the rationality postulate of economics. The book does not reach any final conclusions, but it greatly illuminates the exact areas of possible disagreement and indeed the open-ended nature of ethical reasoning. There is much that economists, and especially welfare economists, can learn from these papers - not least circumspection. (shrink)