There is a well-worn image and phrase for libertarianism: "atomized individualism." This hobgoblin has spread so thoroughly that even some libertarians think their philosophy unreservedly supports private persons, whatever the situation, whatever their behavior. Smith's Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism, corrects this misrepresentation with careful intellectual surveys of Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Butler, Mandeville, and Hutcheson and their respective contributions to political philosophy.

Philosophy of mind has made substantial progress on biologically-rooted approaches to understanding the mind and subjectivity through the enactivist perspective, but research on subjectivity within neuroscience has not kept apace. Indeed, we possess no principled means of relating experiential phenomena to neurophysiological processes. Here, we present the Nested States Model as a framework to guide empirical investigation into the relationship between subjectivity and neurobiology. Building on recent work in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, we develop an account of experiential states (...) as layered, or nested. We argue that this nested structure is also apparent in brain activity. The recognition of this structural homology — that both experiential and brain states can be characterized as systems of nested states — brings our views of subjective mental states into broad alignment with our understanding of general principles and properties of brain activity. This alignment enables a more systematic approach to formulating specific hypotheses and predictions about how the two domains relate to one another. (shrink)

G. H. Mead left the following heretofore unpublished material in his desk at the University of Chicago, and it was first discovered by Charles W. Morris in the Summer of 1931. Mr. Morris, who was one of Mead's students in the 1920's, had been teaching at Rice University, but was appointed as a full-time staff member in the department of philosophy at Chicago in 1931; he was given the same office that Mead had occupied for many years prior to his (...) death in April of that year. Due to severely strained relations between the then newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and the regular staff members in the philosophy department, several of the latter left Chicago and were employed elsewhere in the fall of 1931. Consequently it seemed appropriate that Mr. Morris and some of Mead's other students should deal with the many unpublished typewritten conjectures that Mead left in his office. The entire book, The Philosophy of the Act, is a collection of items found by Mr. Morris, and the following material is from the same source. It came to my hands twenty-seven years ago because I was one of the collaborators in editing The Philosophy of the Act. If there is a slight over-lapping of the following material and subjects discussed in The Philosophy of the Act, it is for the sake of continuity and clarity. I have corrected the material for spelling and punctuation, and I have tried to give it a systematic arrangement. (shrink)

As Ricœur scholars know, the literature by and on Ricœur is vast. Material written by Ricœur that is not collected in published volumes is often difficult to locate, and even in the published volumes it is frequently a challenge to locate where Ricœur discusses a particular topic. Given the amount of his work it can be a challenge too to determine changes in his analyses over the life of his corpus. And locating secondary literature on Ricœur can be equally problematic. (...) In response, we have been working to establish a model for how Ricœur’s corpus might be digitized so that the issues of access, keyword location, and pattern might all be addressed. To develop the model, we are starting with Ricœur’s primary texts in English and plan to expand over time to other languages and to the secondary literature on Ricœur. In the present article we discuss our model and its five steps: digital access; copyright; text preparation for digital searches and analysis; examples of digital searches and analyses; and an archive portal interface that allows users to query based on an extensible set of search variables without needing to know or access the underlying search logic. We also invite interested researchers to help assist the development of this digitization project. (shrink)

As Canadian experience back to the Great Depression reveals, monetary policy can have potent impact on social welfare. Although in recent years Canadian monetary policy has been managed—with little public understanding—for the benefit of wealthy interests, earlier Canadian federal governments, largely through the monetary powers of the Bank of Canada established in 1935, not only financed participation in World War II, but also in the post-war period created the nation's remarkable social programs. Changes in monetary policy beginning in the late (...) 1970s have shifted control over the money system almost entirely to the private commercial banks, and have contributed substantially to severe erosion of those programs. Changes in current monetary policy, shown from past experience to be feasible, could play a key role in financing restoration and improvement of social programs. Some implications for the US and other nations are spelled out. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays examining Paul Ricoeur's writings on law, bringing together eminent Ricoeur scholars from around the world to demonstrate the importance of Ricoeur's philosophy for the juridical field while offering new paths to extend and build on his work.

Anarchism is a theory of the good society, in which justice and social order are maintained without the State (or government). Many anarchists in the libertarian movement (including myself) were heavily influenced by the epistemological and moral theories of Ayn Rand. According to these anarchists, Rand's principles, if consistently applied, lead necessarily to a repudiation of government on moral grounds.

My dissertation presents the outlines of a theory about knowledge and virtue. The core idea is that the nature of knowledge is best understood by reflecting on its role in intellectual practice. What distinguishes knowledge from true opinion is not primarily its causal history or its internal structure, as standard theories argue, but rather the way in which knowledge is embedded or rooted in our styles of explanation, modes of communication and methods of teaching. Knowledge becomes rooted in our practices (...) through the cultivation and exercise of intellectual virtue, or the dispositions and skills needed to master varieties of theoretical and practical reasoning. The link to virtuous intellectual activity is what makes knowledge more valuable than true opinion. This suggests that the virtues of intellectual practice are central to our understanding of the nature of knowledge. I devote the first half of the dissertation to showing why we need a theory of virtue in epistemology and how in general that theory ought to be formulated. In the second half, I address skeptical objections and other problems that arise during my formulation of the theory. ;The starting point is a puzzle from Plato's Meno about the value of knowledge. As Socrates observed, true belief has the same practical value as knowledge. So why should we prefer the one to the other or even distinguish between the two? Most philosophers agree that true belief is not enough for knowledge, but there is little agreement about what it lacks and why the distinction matters. Standard attempts to fill this gap either conceive knowledge as true belief with the right kind of causal history or as responsibly formed belief with the right kind of rational structure. But neither strategy is satisfactory because neither adequately reflects the role that knowledge plays in intellectual practice. This suggests that there is something wrong with the standard belief-theoretic analysis of knowledge. I develop a new account of the nature and value of knowledge that better explains the connection between the norms of virtuous inquiry and the goal of understanding. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that there is a sense in which phenomenological content determines the object of a conscious experience. "Phenomenological content" consists of the senses and sense-structures which become apparent when a subject engages in phenomenological reflection. An introduction to phenomenology is provided for those who are unfamiliar with its practice and literature. ;Various philosophers have argued that the sense of a verbal expression does not determine its reference. Ronald McIntyre has maintained that the arguments against the determination (...) of reference by sense can also be used to show that phenomenological content does not determine the object of a conscious experience. I argue that there is a sense of "determination" for which McIntyre is correct, but that there is another sense of "determination" according to which it would be correct to say that phenomenological content determines the object. ;If "determination" is used in a functional sense, in which A determines B if there is some function which yields B as output given A as input, then McIntyre is correct. The twin earth examples of Putnam and Burge clearly show that two subjects can have experiences with the same phenomenological content but different objects, so phenomenological content does not determine the object in this "functional" sense. But if "determination" means just "selection of one", then there is a determination of the object by phenomenological content from the perspective of, or with respect to, the experience itself. ;The object of a conscious experience is determined through being presented in that experience via a unity of sense . Such determination would not occur if a unity of sense could present anything other than a single, distinct, object. But every unity of sense in the phenomenological content of an experience presents something single and distinct. So there is a sense in which the object of a conscious experience is determined by phenomenological content through presentation. (shrink)