More often than not, business ethics textbooks have included sections on "the great economic debate," that is, the discussion of capitalism as a total system, of the criticisms against it and of the proposed alternatives. The reason for such sections is fairly obvious: at some point one has to consider whether or not all the particular problems of employment, of product quality, of environment, of regulation and so on prove beyond solution without a radical change in the basic institutions of (...) society. Since the collapse of real socialism as an alternative in the period 1989–1991, it has become increasingly difficult to have this discussion. Yet we cannot do without the critique of capitalism even if the answer may be that no other economic system is viable at this moment in history. My interest in this paper is to explore how we might now engage in this critique. Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?" (1989) and Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993) provide a framework for this renewed engagement. (shrink)

For more than two decades, Peter French has been arguing in books, articles and symposia that corporations are genuine actors in the moral universe. Like adult human beings, they can and should take moral responsibility for their actions and be held accountable by the other actors in this universe. I have always argued with my students that the position is both metaphysically incorrect and practically harmful. Now (1995) French has redeveloped his position through 380 pages in Corporate Ethics, probably the (...) most challenging and original Business Ethics textbook yet to appear. It is a work of intellectual sophistication with real world applications. Using the metaphor invaders throughout the book, French argues not only that corporations are moral agents, but also that their moral agency has made the business world of the late twentieth century and of the coming century different from anything of preceding epochs. It is, in his argument, an agency of great potential danger and of great potential benefit, one in terms of which we can address every ethical problem of business. In the essay, I explore Corporate Ethics both on the metaphysical and the practical level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 153 These objections to one side, one must compliment Anglin on the thoroughness with which he pursues his points. He almost always provides several arguments for the same point. So we get eight arguments for libertarianism, five for how natural evil comports with the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful God, and so on. These arguments carefully avoid the repetitiveness one might expect and rather skillfully succeed in (...) revealing a mind concerned with mapping out all the knolls and hollows on the intellectual terrain of the particular issue under consideration. Almost inevitably, any one hook's discussions of such disparate topics will vary in both quality and depth. Some parts of this hook (for example, the chapters on the existence of God and the problem of evil) should he generally accessible to the interested beginner in the philosophy of religion. Chapters 5 and 6 on the goodness of God and the problem of evil are especially well done. Anglin honestly and squarely faces the standard objections and manages to produce as complete and compelling a defense as one is likely to find anywhere in the literature. His use of the Principle of Double Effect to exonerate God from blame for creating creatures who may freely do evil was effective and innovative. Other parts of Free Will and The Christian Faith (say, the chapter defending God's foreknowledge featuring the rather paradoxical concept of "backwards causation " in which future free choices cause past foreknowledge) seem to require and presuppose a more thorough immersion in the recent scholarly literature. Some readers may find the author's use of logical notation to explicate his arguments distracting or alienating, though he takes great pains to explain the symbols he employs in the prose he uses. In addition, he is quite helpful to the reader at the start of each chapter in providing concise previews of the arguments to come. On the whole, this is a hook with occasional flashes of insight and innovation, hut with tangles and tensions in the arguments in other parts. JOSEPH M. INCANDELA Saint Mary's College Notre Dame, Indiana Quest for the Absolute: The Philosophical Vision of Joseph Marechal. By ANTHONY MATTEO. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 173. $30.00 (cloth). The Belgian Jesuit Joseph Marechal (1373-1944) is little known in North American philosophical circles. Indeed he is simply little known outside the somewhat small circle of scholars interested in the history 154 BOOK REVIEWS of twentieth century Roman Catholic theology. There Marechal's work, in particular his five volume Le Point de Depart de la Metaphysique (PDM) has a special place of honor. One need but think of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan among his intellectual heirs to recognize the impact of the thinker and of the volumes. The service of Anthony Matteo's Quest for the Absolute (QA) is to provide a clear and concise study of Marechal's thought. It makes a valuable companion to Joseph Donceel's A Marechal Reader (1970). To my knowledge, the only other full-length discussion in English is Otto Muck's The Transcendental Method (1968), a book which is nearly unreadable in its Eng· lish translation if not in its German original. Marechal was a committed and convinced Thomist, but discussing him under the rubric " transcendental method " brings home a critical conjunction between his Thomism and certain strategies more characteristic of Immanuel Kant and his followers. Instead of seeing Kant simply as undermining the objectivity of metaphysics and of natural theology, he came to believe it possible to take the Kantian "turn to the subject" and to show that it had possibilities not dreamed of by Kant himself. One early indication of Marechal's revisionary approach appeared in his notes for a 1914-1915 course on epistemology: "Kant deceives himself in recognizing, in the operations of spirit, only the pure synthesis of an empirical given. The human spirit is at once an empirical faculty and a faculty of the Absolute. This second aspect was only imperfectly grasped by the author of the Critique of Pure Reason." Thus Marechal was already on his way to answering his opening question for volume I of PDM... (shrink)

This paper introduces “Modernitas”, a child of undefined gender who, having just read Descartes “Discourse on Method” and “Meditations” begins a series of letter to students (who take the role of Modernitas’ parents) asking them to solve various problems posed by Cartesian philosophy, e.g. how to get out Descartes’ nightmare of doubt. Students are tasked with responding to Modernitas’s initial difficulities with Descartes’s philosophy and receive follow-up letters about other philosophers, e.g. Aristotle, Sartre, Plato. This type of exercise has the (...) benefit of keeping students writing the entire semester and is capable of showing students that topics dealt with in philosophy courses are more than mere academic exercises but have real practical relevance. (shrink)

Like politics, all ethics is local. The key to understanding the most difficult ethical issues is in the relationships of neighbors. Consequently, in studying and teaching business ethics, we rightly begin with the micro-setting of the neighborhood and work outward and upward in complexity and challenge. The author has found the operations of a small, imaginary pizzeria on his real street an ideal (in both senses) entry to all the issues of hiring, liability, environment and so on. The method of (...) proceeding is Socratic inasmuch as it proceeds by conversation and takes for granted an elemental understanding on the part of all conversants. It is Cartesian inasmuch as it moves carefully from the simple situations to the most intricate organizational puzzles without ever forgetting the insights garnered at the outset. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS lVIoore. This is a good thing and, I think, marks an advance (evolutionary ~) in the way the history and philosophy of science should be done. In addition, the book itself is well made with very few printing errora. St.•Jerome's College Univei·sity of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada F. F. CENTORE Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology. By MICHAEL NOVAK. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Pp. (...) viii+ 311. $14.95. Not long ago, it was common for people to interrupt theoretical presentations with the exclamation "Bottom-Line! " as a way of indicating that they wished to get right to the practical conclusions. By and large, Michael Novak's long-running debate with the liberation theologians and philosophers has been a debate at the bottom-line. There theologians and philosophers have developed elaborate and varied intellectual arguments which :finish with quite similar decisions in the realm of political economy and international relations. Gustavo Gutierrez argues in terms.of the Catholic Christian tradition, Jon Sobrino in terms of the gospels, J~nrique Dussel in terms of a phenomenology of presence. But, in the end, they almost invariably anive at positions which are fundamentally opposed to capitalist property and market arrangements in general and to the dominance of the first world over the third world in particular. They come out there, of course, because they start "on the left" in their appreciation of the spiritual and material oppression and its causes. No wonder, then, that their direction in politics and economics is almost invariably for some species of socialism. Novak's question in Will it Liberate? is, as the title indicates, whether they have the causes and the solutions straight, and he goes right to it without much eonsideration of their laborious efforts in formal theology and philosophy. People who have read books like The Spfrit of Democratic Capitalism and Freedom icith Justice will be familiar with the basic line of reasoning here. The state of the world, especially in Latin America, the fons et origo of liberation thought, is indeed parlous, marked by widespread poverty, misery, ignorance, and abuse. Thus far, Novak is in complete accord with the liberationists. Nor does he deny that class divisions and national dependency have much to do with the problems. What he asks, :first of a11, is whether Latin American and other third-world economies have been genuinely capitalist and whether a Leninist dependency analysis will BOOK REVIEWS 363 really account for their woes. He argues that the most troubled economies have remained basically pre-capitalist with heavily regulated and pl'otected markets maintained by authoTitarian political systems and that world trade patterns as well as the experience of the " East Asian Rim " casts doubt on the connection between first-world prosperity and thirdworld indigence. Secondly, he calls into doubt the expectation that socialism, under any form which really undoes capitalist structures, can remedy the woes. The socialist aspirations of the liberationsists remain, on the whole, vague and utopian; but, to the extent that they take flesh, they tend toward a statist control of politics, economics, and culture. But all our experience of statism, in the world beyond dreams, is one of limited political and cultural freedom and of diminished economic energy. The second world, including its extensions in Cuba and Nicaragua, is proof that liberation, so understood, will not liberate. What Novak would like of the liberation theologians and philosophers is to give more serious attention to the liberal tradition with its emphasis on individual autonomy and voluntariness in politics, economy, and culture. Without saying so explicitly, he asks them to study Madison and Mill now in prefel'ence to Marx and Lenin. He insists that this tradition is, in its best manifestations, profoundly social and that its application, in contrast to that of the socialist ideal, has meant unparalleled (albeit imperfect ) achievements in alleviating misery and in liberating people. For the most part, it is a practical tradition which has developed institutions of democratic capitalism while eschewing the discussion of theology and metaphysics. However, Novak believes that these institutions, despite the secularism of many of the chief liberal writers, have their roots in a Judeo-Christian sensibility combining confidence in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:512 BOOK REVIEWS Pagels simply shifted the sense in which she is using the word "liberty " with reference to readings of Gen. 1-3-from the earlier discussion in which it had primarily a theological and moral sense, to the discussion in chapter five, where a decidedly political specification is introduced. The Augustine who in contrast to earlier theologians appears as little more than an ideologue for the Roman Catholic (...) Empire is one which is engineered largely by this shi£t in term usage, and not by evidence from the texts. With considerably less trouble, Pagels could have found in Eusebius of Caesarea, or some other court theologian, a willing ideologue much more pliable than Augustine was. Her point that theologians and historians of ideas need to take more seriously the political agendas against which ideas arise is well taken. But by insisting that it was the political expediency of Augustine's teaching on original sin that caused it to catch on (pp. 99-100, 105, 118), Pagels skates perilously close to a reductionist reading of this theology despite her stated intention (p. xxvii) to the contrary. Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania JOHN C. CAVADINI Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by ALASDAIR MAc!NTYRE. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Pp. xi+ 410. $22.95 (hardbound). One part of the Enlightenment project, for the past 300 years or so, has been to reach assured foundations for both thought and action. Thus Descartes, near the beginning of this project, insisted on starting with propositions which are clearly and distinctly true and on suspending commitment to any received wisdom. From this untainted beginning, the,thinker could build the edifice of thought and culture securely. Ordinary people might not maintain such purity; but, so influential has this image been in Western history, that even today we take the scientist and the philosopher as critical inquirers unbound by ties of tradition. Alasdair Maclntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is a brilliant challenge to this common understanding. Maclntyre's title indicates the scope as well as the direction of his argument. When questions of justice arise, that is, questions about the relationships of people with each other, about the apportioning of the goods of society and so on, they cannot be answered without reversing the question, without asking about the society in which the question BOOK REVIEWS 518 arises. To a great extent, the deeper question can only he answered from within that society with all of its givens. Sorting out the claims and counter-claims requires us to put them in the context of tradition. The same must he said for the questions of truth and of inquiry which always flow though and around the arguments about right and wrong. There.too we must reverse the question. The standards of rationality, like those of justice, inhere in society, in an ongoing enterprise from which the thinker cannot separate himself if he is to proceed. Hence the question, "Whose rationality? " The rejection of Descartes's pure beginning is not original with MacIntyre. C. S. Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to name just two among many, made the argument too effectively for rebuttal. What is different about Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is that it focusses as much on the relative pronouns as on the substantives. It traces concern about justice and rationality through history. Macintyre takes it as "crucial that the concept of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rational enquiry cannot be elucidated apart from its exemplifications." However, rather than attempting a universal survey, he attends to four exemplifications capable of supporting and clarifying the central thesis: ancient Greece from Homer to Aristotle, patristic and medieval Christianity with Augustine and Aquinas as the center points, the Scottish enlightenment beginning in the kirk and ending with Hume and Reid, and finally the very liberalism stemming from the enlightenment and challenged by the book at hand. What unifies a tradition is not so much an idea as a problem and a preoccupation. The problem and its attendant preoccupation become the focus of struggle(s) within society in a way which forms its internal development, which establishes its intellectual and moral perimeter, and which sets it in relation to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:744 BOOK REVIEWS tension. He rightly argues that indigenization is mission and that only in dialogue can mission take place, while both are distinct from one another. Hillman's hook is full of promise hut requires more self-critical scrutiny, some sense of historical substantiation, as well as interac· tion with the specificities of the world religions. For a ' Catholic ' ap· proach there are too many questions left unanswered (...) and too many problems left unexplored. West London Institute of Higher Education lsleworth, Middlesex GAVIN D'CosTA Religions and the Truth: Philosophical Reflections and Perspectives. By HENDRIK M. VROOM. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989. Pp. 388. $23.95 (paper). Hendrik Vroom announces his purpose in Religions and the Truth as " an inquiry into what people understand by truth in religion." What puzzles him is that religions commonly claim to provide an access to the truth and yet differ not only about the access and about the truth, hut also about what it means to achieve the goal. His basic strategy is to find both the common ground and the differences through a detailed study of five major religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this way, he hopes to find out something about each tradition and its peculiar concern with truth and then to work out a model for inter-religious conversation. It is thus a philosophical effort not depending essentially on any one of the traditions, hut it is also of theological relevance, as each of the traditions appraises its relations with the others. Clearly Vroom works at the intersection of several major controver· sies. He starts with the philosophical debate about the concept truth itself. Immediately the strengths and weaknesses of the whole hook become apparent. Vroom is outstanding at posing the problem and at surveying the major positions in the debate. Yet, although he is will· ing to lay out the pros and cons, he avoids stating and defending a full position of his own. Later in the hook, this avoidance is a major drawback in the analysis. First of all, some inchoate theory of truth always lies behind the sorting out which goes with a descriptive analysis. Won't a decision about truth as correspondence or as coherence affect how one appraises different interpretations of this or that religious tradition? More importantly, the transition from the descriptive to the normative in the last two chapters absolutely requires such a decision. BOOK REVIEWS 745 Having explored the truth-debate and its extension into the philos· ophy of religion, Vroom embarks on his investigation of the traditions. His approach in each case is to look for some general notions which permeate the tradition and in particular for ways in which "truth " and " reality " come to the fore as concepts and as preoccupations. In this way, one gets not only a feel for the nuances of satya, emet, aletheia, and haqq in the various scriptures hut also for their place in a total world-view and life-orientation. It becomes obvious that these terms {roughly translated as truth) are neither completely univocal nor completely equivocal. The Moslem and the Christian arguing about (the) truth may indeed talk the same language about the same world, hut they {and we) should not be quick to think that they do so. Strangely, although I enjoyed this journey through the traditions greatly, I felt least satisfied with the depiction of Christianity, where presumably I am most at home. The exploration of the five traditions leads hack to another general philosophical controversy, about religion taken generally. In this section, Vroom's method is more successful, since the close attention to diversity reveals how hard it is to zero in on some one element such as "the sense of the sacred." Vroom finds instead a conglomerate of in· sights and experiences with some reference to a transcendent under· stood (or not understood) differently in every case. How a tradition deals with finitude, responsibility, happiness, understanding, evil, and suffering makes for its own unity, and its connection to "the trans· cendent " marks it as characteristically religious. He has the greatest difficulty fitting Buddhism into this scheme, but he does so by stretching... (shrink)

This book presents a detailed analysis of three ancient models of spatial magnitude, time, and local motion. The Aristotelian model is presented as an application of the ancient, geometrically orthodox conception of extension to the physical world. The other two models, which represent departures from mathematical orthodoxy, are a "quantum" model of spatial magnitude, and a Stoic model, according to which limit entities such as points, edges, and surfaces do not exist in (physical) reality. The book is unique in its (...) discussion of these ancient models within the context of later philosophical, scientific, and mathematical developments. (shrink)

Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future—that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition (...) of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a “politics of purity”—an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories. Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy—and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy. Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a “creolizing subjectivity” that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories. (shrink)

If a man born blind were to gain his sight in later life would he be able to identify the objects he saw around him? Would he recognise a cube and a globe on the basis of his earlier tactile experiences alone? This was William Molyneux's famous question to John Locke and it was much discussed by English and French empiricists in the eighteenth century as part of the controversy over innatism and abstract ideas. Dr Morgan examines the whole history (...) of this debate: Locke's own (negative) answer to the question, the contributions of Berkeley, Condillac, Diderot and Voltaire and the factual accounts of early cataract operations and modern laboratory studies. He shows how this debate is involved in the development and eventual separation of philosophy and experimental psychology after the eighteenth century and considers why the original question is effectively still unanswered. This is one problem-area with its intricate cluster of connected conceptual and technical difficulties which suggests the need for some reunion or at least collaboration between the two subjects. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the pragma-dialectical conception of a fallacy, according to which a fallacy is an argumentative speech act which violates one or more of the rules of 'rational discussion'. That conception is found to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for committing a fallacy. It is also found wanting in several other respects.

It is not very surprising that it was no less true in antiquity than it is today that adult human beings are held to be responsible for most of their actions. Indeed, virtually all cultures in all historical periods seem to have had some conception of human agency which, in the absence of certain responsibility-defeating conditions, entails such responsibility. Few philosophers have had the temerity to maintain that this entailment is trivial because such responsibility-defeating conditions are always present. Another not (...) very surprising fact is that ancient thinkers tended to ascribe integrality to "what is" (to on). That is, they typically regarded "what is" as a cosmos or whole with distinguishable parts that fit together in some coherent or cohesive manner, rather than either as a "unity" with no parts or as a collection containing members (ta onta or "things that are") standing in no "natural" relations to one another. 1 The philoso phical problem of determinism and responsibility may, I think, best be characterized as follows: it is the problem of preserving the phenomenon of human agency (which would seem to require a certain separateness of individual human beings from the rest of the cosmos) when one sets about the philosophical or scientific task of explaining the integrality of "what is" by means of the development of a theory of causation or explanation ( concepts that came to be lumped together by the Greeks under the term "aitia"). (shrink)

This paper is a critical assessment of argumentum ad baculum, or appeal to force. Its principal contention is that, contrary to common opinion, there is no general fallacy of ad baculum. Most real-life ad baculums are, in fact, fairly strong. A basic logical form for reconstructed ad baculums is proposed, and a number of heterodoxical conclusions are also advanced and argued for. They include that ad baculum is not necessarily a prudential argument, that ad baculum need not involve force, violence, (...) or threats, and that one can argue ad baculum to oneself. The starting point of the paper, however, is a critical evaluation of three ad baculums from the exercise sets of Irving Copi's well-known Introduction to Logic. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Aristotle on the Infinite (to apeiron): From Cosmological Principle to Mathematical Operation Aristotle on Space: Magnitude (megethos) and Place (topos) Aristotle on Time: The “Number of Motion” and “Ever‐rolling Stream” Bibliography.

Some carnivores defend the position that the opportunistic consumption of meat is morally permissible even under the assumption that it is morally wrong to act in ways that ause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings. Ordering and consuming chicken once a week, they argue, will not increase the numbers of chickens suffering or slaughtered, since the system of purchasing and farming chickens is not sufficiently fine‐tuned to register differences at margin. We argue that, insensitivity of the market notwithstanding, consistent consequentialists are (...) morally prohibited from each additional purchase and consumption of meat. (shrink)

The existence of God as demonstrated from motion has preoccupied men in every age, and still stands as one of the critical questions of philosophic inquiry. The four thinkers Father Buckley discusses were selected because their methods of reasoning exhibit sharp contrasts when they are juxtaposed. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts (...) of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future--that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition (...) of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a "politics of purity"--an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories. Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy--and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy. Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a "creolizing subjectivity" that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of the so-called slippery slope argument for the conservative position on abortion. The argument was discussed in the philosophic literature some time back, but has since fallen into disfavor. The argument is first exposed and a general objection to it is advanced, then rebutted. Rosalind Hursthouse's more detailed and stronger objection is next aired, but also found less than convincing. In the course of discussing her objection, the correct form of the argument is identified, (...) and it's noted that rejection of the argument requires finding fault with its inductive premise. That, in turn, requires either (a) identifying and defending a cutoff point other than conception, or (b) not identifying a cutoff point but directly attacking the argument's conclusion. As far as (a) is concerned, all except one alternative cutoff point have severe problems that have been well discussed in the literature. The one that doesn't, the appearance of the ‘primitive streak’, is examined in detailed, but ultimately rejected. As for (b), five different grounds for rejecting the conclusion are identified and discussed, but none is found plausible. Variations on the slippery slope argument, concerning different conclusions that it may have, are then distinguished, related to each other, and critically discussed, and the paper ends with some cautionary remarks about the defense of the argument tendered. (shrink)

We develop a framework for assessing security market quality, relating five elements of market design to three metrics of market integrity and two metrics of market efficiency. We empirically implement this integrity–efficiency MQ framework by testing a hypothesis that trade-based ramping manipulation at the close raises execution costs on 24 security markets worldwide. Estimating a simultaneous equations model of ramping incidence, spreads, and the probability of deploying real-time surveillance, we show that quoted bid-ask spreads are positively related to the incidence (...) of MTC across seven liquidity deciles. The magnitude is economically significant; improving market integrity by cutting MTC in half reduces spreads 6–11 %. Allowing direct market access in conjunction with RTS, conducting auctions at the close, and developing regulations that require surveillance, all reduce MTC and thereby lower spreads, assuring better market integrity and enhancing market efficiency. Introducing circuit breakers or prohibiting shorts poses integrity–efficiency tradeoffs. (shrink)

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, systematic scientific abstracting played a crucial role in reconfiguring the sciences on an international scale. For mathematicians, the 1931 launch of the Zentralblatt für Mathematik and 1940 launch of Mathematical Reviews marked and intensified a fundamental transformation, not just to the geographic scale of professional mathematics but to the very nature of mathematicians’ research and theories. It was not an accident that mathematical abstracting in this period coincided with an embrace across mathematical (...) research fields of a distinctive form of symbolic and conceptual abstraction. This essay examines the historical, institutional, embodied, and conceptual bases of mathematical abstracting and abstraction in the mid-twentieth century, placing them in historical context within the first half of the twentieth century and then examining their consequences and legacies for the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focused on scale, media, and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and its forms of articulation, my analysis connects the changing social structure of modern mathematical research communities to their changing domains of investigation and resources for representation and collective understanding. (shrink)