We study global dynamical properties of the isometry group of the Borel randomization of a separable complete structure. We show that if properties such as the Rokhlin property, topometric generics, and extreme amenability hold for the isometry group of the structure, then they also hold in the isometry group of the randomization.

Leif Wenar examines the impact on takings scholarship of the redefinition of "property" early in the twentieth century. He argues that the Hohfeldian characterization of property as rights (instead of as tangible things) forced major scholars such as Michelman, Sax, and Epstein into extreme interpretations of the Takings Clause. This extremism is unnecessary, however, since the original objections to the idea that "property is things" are mistaken.

This paper supports the personal data platform cooperative as a means of bringing about John Rawls’s favoured institutional realisation of a just society, the property-owning democracy. It describes personal data platform cooperatives and applies Rawls’s political philosophy to analyse the institutional forms of a just society in relation to the economic power deriving from aggregating personal data. It argues that a society involving a significant number of personal data platform cooperatives will be more suitable to realising Rawls’s principle of (...) fair equality of opportunity. (shrink)

It is widely thought that mind–body substance dualism is implausible at best, though mere “property” dualism is defensible and even flourishing. This paper argues that substance dualism is no less plausible than property dualism and even has two advantages over it.

I present an annotated development of the basic ideas of the Geneva School approach to the foundations of physics and the structures which emerge as mathematical representations of the physically dual notions of state and property.

All of the attempts to date to find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for life, in order to provide an essential definition of life, have failed. We only have at our disposal series of lists that contain diverse characteristics usually found in living beings. Some authors have drawn from this fact the conclusion that life is not a natural kind. It will be argued here that this conclusion is too hasty and that if life is understood as a (...) natural kind in the non-essentialist sense of a homeostatic property cluster, it is easy to see why the attempts to find a unique and essentialist definition of life have failed. Understanding life in this way would imply that the pretension to find such a type of definition should be abandoned. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has gone a long way toward placing Locke in his intellectual and historical context, and thus in coming to see the respect in which his work has a previously unacknowledged conceptual unity. There remains, however, some difficulty in reconciling the style, purpose and content of his two major works. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is usually read as primarily concerned with issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, while the Two Treatises of Government is regarded as less systematically (...) rigorous, or at worst ad hoc political analysis. These two sides of Locke thus remain virtually unrelated fields of specialization among interpreters. ;My dissertation is a contribution to the project of understanding Locke's work as a connected whole; without attributing to him an attitude of scientific reductionism, I argue that the account which Locke gives of personal property in the Second Treatise bears an important relation to his account of qualities and personal identity in the Essay. Specifically, I try to make plausible the claim that there is in Locke a direct analogy between the property of a human person, on one hand, and the properties of a natural substance on the other. I suggest that Locke's methodological atomism in science and epistemology parallels his qualifiedly individualistic political theory, and thus that his claims about private property can be understood in terms of a broader philosophical context than is usually supposed. ;As part of a larger project concerning the genealogy of the concept of property and the relation between metaphysics and morality, I expect this work to have useful implications regarding much of contemporary moral and political theory. Given the historical influence of Locke's political work, a careful analysis of it in terms of its epistemological and scientific grounding should contribute to a rethinking of much twentieth century work on property and justice. (shrink)

Veit suggests that the challenge of coordinating movement in multicellular organisms led to the evolution of a prioritizing value system, which rendered organisms complex enough to be sentient and drove the Cambrian explosion, while the absence of this evaluation system led to the demise of Ediacaran animals. In this commentary we criticize Veit’s terminology and evolutionary proposals, arguing that his terminology and evolutionary scenarios are problematic, and put forward alternative proposals. We suggest that sentience is a system property, and (...) that the evolution of sentience was the outcome of the evolution of open-ended associative learning, which included the coevolution of sensory, motor, memory, and value subsystems. We suggest that these coevolutionary system dynamics were a factor in the Cambrian explosion and contributed to the extinction of the Ediacaran biota. (shrink)

Autorzy artykułu argumentują, że libertarianie (tacy jak Murray Rothbard, Stephan Kinsella), którzy jednocześnie podpisują się pod zasadą proporcjonalności w obronie własności prywatnej oraz pod poglądem, iż posiadanie prawa własności prywatnej oznacza posiadanie prawa do jej obrony, popadają tym samym w dylemat polegający na tym, iż jeżeli jedynym sposobem obrony prawa własności prywatnej jest jego nieproporcjonalna obrona, to to własności tej - wbrew temu, co ów pogląd głosi - nie towarzyszy prawo do jej obrony. Najlepiej uzasadnionym sposobem wyjścia z tego dylematu (...) jest osłabienie peremptoryjności praw własności prywatnej, czyli skonceptualizowanie tychże praw jako absolutnych jedynie w słabym sensie tego słowa (korzystając z dystynkcji zaproponowanej przez Matthew H. Kramera). Z kolei libertarianie, którzy tak jak Walter Block chcieliby wybrnąć z rzeczonego dylematu poprzez zastąpienie zasady proporcjonalności zasadą delikatności, popadają w innego rodzaju problemy (nieintuicyjność moralną czy ogólną niekoherencję), co jest tylko kolejnym argumentem na rzecz tezy, iż osłabienie wymogów praw własności prywatnej jest najlepiej uzasadnionym sposobem przezwyciężenia rozważanego tu dylematu. (shrink)

The property theory of musical works says that each musical work is a property that is instantiated by its occurrences, that is, the work's performances and playings. The property theory provides ontological explanations very similar to those given by its popular cousin, the type/token theory of musical works, but it is both simpler and stronger. However, type/token theorists often dismiss the property theory. In this essay, I formulate a version of the property theory that identifies (...) each type (thus, each musical work) with a unique property. I then scrutinize the arguments offered for thinking that types, including musical works, are distinct from properties. I respond that no such argument is forceful and conclude that the property theory of musical works is superior to the type/token theory. (shrink)

John Locke's theory of property is perhaps the most distinctive and the most influential aspect of his political theory. In this book James Tully uses an hermeneutical and analytical approach to offer a revolutionary revision of early modern theories of property, focusing particularly on that of Locke. Setting his analysis within the intellectual context of the seventeenth century, Professor Tully overturns the standard interpretations of Locke's theory, showing that it is not a justification of private property. Instead (...) he shows it to be a theory of individual use rights within a framework of inclusive claim rights. He links Locke's conception of rights not merely to his ethical theory, but to the central arguments of his epistemology, and illuminates the way in which Locke's theory is tied to his metaphysical views of God and man, his theory of revolution and his account of a legitimate polity. (shrink)

This chapter defends the property dualism argument. The term “semantic premise” mentioned is used to refers to an assumption identified by Brian Loar that antiphysicalist arguments, such as the property dualism argument, tacitly assume that a statement of property identity that links conceptually independent concepts is true only if at least one concept picks out the property it refers to by connoting a contingent property of that property. It is argued that, the property (...) that does the work in explaining the possibility of a posteriori identities need not be a first-order property of the referent in question. On his view, the property dualism argument requires only a weaker semantic premise, which allows that the property in question be a higher order property. A refined version of the property dualism argument is formulated, which uses the weaker premise, and defends the argument against various objections. (shrink)

New developments in biotechnology radically alter our relationship with our bodies. Body tissues can now be used for commercial purposes, while external objects, such as pacemakers, can become part of the body. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives transcends the everyday responses to such developments, suggesting that what we most fear is the feminisation of the body. We fear our bodies are becoming objects of property, turning us into things rather than persons. This book evaluates how well-grounded this (...) fear is, and suggests innovative models of regulating what has been called 'the new Gold Rush' in human tissue. This is an up-to-date and wide-ranging synthesis of market developments in body tissue, bringing together bioethics, feminist theory and lessons from countries that have resisted commercialisation of the body, in a theoretically sophisticated and practically significant approach. (shrink)

Can the right to private property be claimed as one of the `rights of mankind'? This is the central question of this comprehensive and critical examination of the subject of private property. Jeremy Waldron contrasts two types of arguments about rights: those based on historical entitlement, and those based on the importance of property to freedom. He provides a detailed discussion of the theories of property found in Locke's Second Treatise and Hegel's Philosophy of Right to (...) illustrate this contrast. The book contains original analyses of the concept of ownership, the ideas of rights, and the relation between property and equality. The author's overriding determination throughout is to follow through the arguments and values used to justify private ownership. He finds that the traditional arguments about property yield some surprisingly radical conclusions. (shrink)

The paper reviews the empirical evidence for highly significant variation across perceivers in hue perception and argues that color physicalism cannot accommodate this variability. Two views that can accommodate the individual differences in hue perception are considered: the self-locating property theory, according to which colors are self-locating properties, and color relationalism, according to which colors are relations to perceivers and viewing conditions. It is subsequently argued that on a plausible rendition of the two views, the self-locating theory has a (...) slight advantage over color relationalism in being truer to the phenomenology of our color experiences. (shrink)

Shmuel Nili claims that when a country buys fossil fuels from dictatorships it becomes complicit with property rights violations in those dictatorships. Thus, Nili argues, people who have a strong commitment to property rights should support a ban on fossil fuel imports from dictatorships, and a transition to renewable energy. This article critically discusses Nili’s argument. The argument fails to consider competing moral reasons that some people may have to oppose a ban on fossil fuel imports from dictatorships, (...) such as moral preference for family and compatriots. The argument also mistakenly assumes that renewable energy would be overwhelmingly economically attractive when fossil fuel imports are forbidden, and that switching to renewable energy would not involve importing stolen goods too. The article ends more propositively, by elaborating an alternative argument that Nili dismisses too quickly, and which may help persuade those who are strongly committed to property rights of transitioning to renewable energy: the argument that transitioning would help avoid violating those rights through contributions to harmful climate change. (shrink)

We introduce the anti-rectangle refining property for forcing notions and investigate fragments of Martin’s axiom for ℵ1 dense sets related to the anti-rectangle refining property, which is close to some fragment of Martin’s axiom for ℵ1 dense sets related to the rectangle refining property, and prove that they are really weaker fragments.

In the literature on health, naturalism and normativism are typically characterized as espousing and rejecting, respectively, the view that health is objective and value-free. This article points out that there are two distinct dimensions of disagreement, regarding objectivity and value-ladenness, and thus arranges naturalism and normativism as diagonal opposites on a two-by-two matrix of possible positions. One of the remaining quadrants is occupied by value-dependent realism, holding that health facts are value-laden and objective. The remaining quadrant, which holds that they (...) are non-objective but value-free, is unexplored. The article endorses a view in the latter quadrant, namely, the view that health is a secondary property. The article argues that a secondary property framework provides the resources to respond to the deepest objections to a broadly Boorsean account of natural function, and so preserves the spirit, though not the letter, of that account. Treating health as a secondary property permits a naturalistic explanation—specifically, an evolutionary explanation—of the health concept, in terms of the assistance such a concept might have provided to the survival and reproduction of those organisms that had it. This provides the explanation, missing from Boorse's account, for the fact that function is determined with reference to the contribution to the goals of survival and reproduction, relative to the age of the sex of the species, rather than some other equally natural goals or reference classes. _1_ Introduction _2_ Two Ways to Disagree about Health _3_ Secondary Properties _4_ Health as a Secondary Property _5_ Conclusion. (shrink)

We prove various theorems about the preservation and destruction of the tree property at ω2. Working in a model of Mitchell [9] where the tree property holds at ω2, we prove that ω2 still has the tree property after ccc forcing of size \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\aleph_1}$$\end{document} or adding an arbitrary number of Cohen reals. We show that there is a relatively mild forcing in this same model which destroys the tree (...) property. Finally we prove from a supercompact cardinal that the tree property at ω2 can be indestructible under ω2-directed closed forcing. (shrink)

I try in this essay to accomplish two things. First I offer some first thoughts toward a clarification of the ethical foundations of private property rights that avoids pitfalls common to more strictly Lockean theories, and is thus better prepared to address arguments posed by critics of standard private property arrangements. Second, I'll address one critical argument that has become pretty common over the years. While versions of the argument can be traced back at least to Pierre Joseph (...) Proudhon, I'll focus on a formulation given it by Jeremy Waldron. The basic idea is that the only sound arguments for private property rights lead to the conclusion that society has an obligation to insure that every citizen possess private property. In Waldron's formulation, what is justifiable is a general, rather than a special, right to private property. I shall try to suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. (shrink)

I argue that the freedom which is to coexist with the freedom of choice of others in accordance with a universal law mentioned in Kant's Rechtslehre is not itself freedom of choice. Rather, it is the independence which is a condition of being able to exercise genuine free choice by not having to act in accordance with the choices of others. Kant's distinction between active and passive citizenship appears, however, to undermine this idea of independence, because the possession of a (...) certain type of property right on the part of some citizens makes it possible for them to dominate others. Kant's account of property in this way turns out to be central to the question as to whether his Rechtslehre represents an internally consistent account of how freedom can be guaranteed within a legal and political community. I go on to argue that Kant's attempt to justify a pre-political right of property cannot be viewed as a successful justification of private property, and that he should have abandoned the notion of su... (shrink)

In a 2010 paper Daley argues, contra Fodor, that several syntactically simple predicates express structured concepts. Daley develops his theory of structured concepts within Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic . I rectify various misconceptions of Daley’s concerning TIL. I then develop within TIL an improved theory of how structured concepts are structured and how syntactically simple predicates are related to structured concepts.

Both community and property are, each in its own way, exclusionary concepts. Property — certainly private property — is defined in large part by a right of exclusion. And although "community" sounds like a warm, inclusive word, real-world communities often define themselves by reference to an array of excluded "others" and erect fences and patrol borders to keep these others out. Enthusiasm for these exclusions is made to seem legitimate by the thought that those excluded from my (...) property probably have somewhere else of their own to go to, and those excluded from our community probably also have a community of their own to live in. In fact, neither proposition is entirely justified. We know that in most economically developed countries there are large numbers of people who live as transients and are not welcome or rooted in any community. Their only places of refuge are the substantial patches of public property which society maintains for everyone’s use. But public places are not themselves unregulated, and often they are regulated according to norms of community and in response to communitarian pressures. If these communities are themselves exclusive in character, they tend to reproduce at the public property level the exclusions that manifest themselves at the private property level. This Article attempts to chart and analyze the deadly combination of exclusive community and exclusive property that these modes of regulation represent. (shrink)

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Volume 22, Issue 02, August 2022. We generically construct a model in which the [math]-separation property is true, i.e. every pair of disjoint [math]-sets can be separated by a [math]-definable set. This answers an old question from the problem list “Surrealist landscape with figures” by A. Mathias from 1968. We also construct a model in which the (lightface) [math]-separation property is true.

It is common to posit a clear opposition between the values served by property systems and the value of the environment. To give the environment its due, this view holds, the role of private property needs to be limited. Support for this has been said to be found in Locke’s famous ‘enough and as good’ proviso. This article shows that this opposition is mistaken, and corrects the implied reading of Locke’s proviso. In reality, there is no opposition between (...) property and the environment. This is shown using Locke’s theory of appropriation, as well as the real-life case of instream water appropriation. (shrink)

Can we employ the property of rationality in establishing what rationality requires? According to a central and formal thesis of John Broome’s work on rational requirements, the answer is ‘no’ – at least if we expect a precise answer. In particular, Broome argues that (i) the property of full rationality (i.e. whether or not you are fully rational) is independent of whether we formulate conditional requirements of rationality as having a wide or a narrow logical scope. That is, (...) (ii) by replacing a wide-scope requirement with a corresponding narrow-scope requirement (or vice versa), we do not alter the situations in which a person is fully rational. As a consequence, (iii) the property of full rationality is unable to guide us in determining whether a rational requirement has a wide or a narrow logical scope. We cannot resolve the wide/narrow scope debate by appealing to a theory of fully rational attitudes. This paper argues that (i), (ii) and (iii) are incorrect. Replacing a wide- with a corresponding narrow-scope requirement (or vice versa) can alter the set of circumstances in which a person is fully rational. The property of full rationality is therefore not independent of whether we formulate conditional requirements of rationality as having a wide or a narrow logical scope. As a consequence, the property of full rationality can guide us in determining what rationality requires – even in cases where we expect a precise answer. (shrink)

In contemporary market societies, the laws do not place individuals under enforceable obligations to aid others. Perhaps the most striking exception to this broad generalization is the practice of conscription of able-bodied males into military service, particularly in time of war. Another notable exception is the legal enforcement in some contemporary societies of “Good Samaritan” obligations — obligations to provide temporary aid to victims of emergencies, such as car accident victims. The obligation applies to those who are in the immediate (...) vicinity of the emergency and who can supply aid of great value to the victim at small risk and tolerable cost to themselves. The fact that not all contemporary societies have enacted such Good Samaritan laws underscores the point that the general rule is that individuals are under no legal obligation to help others. According to some moral views, this legal situation approximately accords with the moral fact that persons who have not voluntarily incurred obligations to aid others should not be coerced into tendering such aid. Moreover, it is worth noting that these two prominent exceptions to the tendency of legal systems to eschew enforcement of positive obligations to aid others are plausibly in everyone's ex ante interest and not notably redistributive in intent. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an argument for stakeholder rights. It begins by exploring two major answers to the question, 'in whose interests should the commercial company function?'. One claims parity for other stakeholders alongside the shareholder on the basis of a theory of property rights, and another on a theory of citizenship. Each of these answers, it is argued, fail to convince. The way forward is to recast the initial question, not asking in whose interest the company should function, (...) but which type of interest, potentially located in any sort of person, might the company serve. That interest is identified and distinguished from others that people affected by corporations might have. These distinctions then provide the basis for an argument in favour of enfranchising two sorts of individual: sovereign stakeholders, in charge of monitoring the formulation and revision of company objectives; and secondary stakeholders, who along with those in the first category monitor the means used to achieve those objectives.The paper concludes that these distinctions should lead us to reconsider other elements in the corporate governance debate, such as the nature of a director's fiduciary duty; and the difference between democracy in corporations and democracy in the wider society. (shrink)

Kant's political philosophy in general is characterized by two aspects which sometimes compete with each other and sometimes supplement each other: an individualist element on the one hand and a social or "communitarian" element on the other hand. This paper deals with Kant's theory of private property. It attempts to show something that is usually overlooked in the secondary literature: that Kant has two, not just one argument for property. One is based on his theory of freedom and (...) expresses the individualist aspect of his thinking. The other argument is based on Kant's principle of right and expresses the social aspect of his political thought. Despite some problems with his arguments the complexity of Kant's theory remains impressive. (shrink)

Two recent cases raise the question: Should the body be considered a form of property? Patients generally do not share in the profits derived from the applications of research on their body parts and products. Nor is their consent for research required so long as the body part is unidentified and is removed in the course of treatment. A market in body parts and products would require consent to all categories of research and ensure that patients are protected from (...) coercion and given the chance to be paid fairly for their contributions. Such a market might force us to rethink our policies prohibiting organ sales. Donors, recipients, and society will benefit from a market in body parts so long as owners—and no one else—retain control over their bodies. (shrink)

This paper is about the relation between two metaphysical topics: the nature of properties, and way the instantiation of a property is sometimes “realized in” something more fundamental. It is partly an attempt to develop further, but also to correct, my earlier treatments of these topics. In my published work on realization, including my book Physical Realization, I was at pains to insist that acceptance of my view about this does not commit one to the causal theory of properties (...) I have defended in several places. I held that it commits one to the claim that within any given world, properties with the same causal profile are identical, but not to the requirement that a property must have the same causal profile in any world in which it can be instantiated. I now think that this was a mistake. There is an argument from the account of realization I have offered to the conclusion that, if physicalism is true, properties of macroscopic objects have their causal profiles essentially. In what follows I will present that argument.Along the way I will correct what now seem to me mistakes in my earlier presentationsof the account of realization. And I will conclude with an additional argument for the causal theory of properties, one that does not tie it to the assumption that physicalism is true or to my account of realization. (shrink)

Intellectual property (IP) can internalize positive externalities associated with the creation and discovery of ideas, thereby increasing investment in efforts to create and discover ideas. However, IP law also causes negative externalities. Strict IP rights raise the transaction costs associated with consuming and building on existing ideas. This causes a tragedy of the anticommons, in which valuable resources are underused and underdeveloped. By disincentivizing creative projects that build on existing ideas, IP protection, even if it increases original innovation, can (...) inadvertently reduce the rate of iterative innovation. The net effect of IP law on innovation and welfare depends on the relative magnitude of these positive and negative externalities. We argue that the current regime probably suffers from excessive, and excessively rigid, IP protection. This motivates the search for institutional alternatives and complements. We suggest that a monocentric IP rights regime may not be the only, or the most efficient, way to internalize the positive externalities of innovation. The knowledge economy supports the emergence of diverse, polycentric forms of bottom-up self-governance, both market and community led, that entail the citizen coproduction of the norms and practices of intellectual creation and discovery. (shrink)

Russell’s type theory has been the standard property theory for years, relying on rigid type distinctions at the grammatical level to circumvent the paradoxes of predication. In recent years it has been convincingly argued by Bealer, Cochiarella, Turner and others that many linguistic and ontological data are best accounted for by using a type-free property theory. In the spirit of exploring alternatives and “to have as many opportunities as possible for theory comparison”, this paper presents another type-free (...) class='Hi'>property theory, to be called P*, intended for applications in Montague-style natural language semantics and formal ontology. The theory is philosophically grounded on Gupta’s and Belnap’s revision theory of definitions and its basic idea is viewing predication (exemplification) as a ‘circular concept’ that can be captured by circular definitions. The paper has the following fourteen sections: (1) Introduction; (2) Formal type-free property theory; (3) Applying RTD [revision theory of definitions] to exemplification; (4) The system P*; (5) Some features of P*; (6) A comparison with Turner’s system; (7) Entailment and P*; (8) P* and natural language semantics; (9) Noun phrases; (10) The need for type-freedom in semantics; (11) Arithmetic in P*; (12) Arithmetic in PN*; (13) Complexity of P*; (14) Conclusion, and acknowledgments. (shrink)

Substance dualism is widely rejected by philosophers of mind, but many continue to accept some form of property dualism. The assumption here is that one can consistently believe that (1) mental properties are not physical properties, while denying that (2) mental particulars are not physical particulars. But is this assumption true? This paper considers several analyses of what makes something a physical particular (as opposed to a non-physical particular), and it is argued that on any plausible analysis, accepting (1) (...) requires accepting (2) as well. (shrink)