The dominant approach to environmental policy endorsed by conservative and libertarian policy thinkers, so-called “free market environmentalism”, is grounded in the recognition and protection of property rights in environmental resources. Despite this normative commitment to property rights, most self-described FME advocates adopt a utilitarian, welfare-maximization approach to climate change policy, arguing that the costs of mitigation measures could outweigh the costs of climate change itself. Yet even if anthropogenic climate change is decidedly less than catastrophic, human-induced climate change is likely (...) to contribute to environmental changes that violate traditional conceptions of property rights. Viewed globally, the actions of some countries—primarily industrialized nations—are likely to increase environmental harms suffered by other countries—less developed nations that have not made any significant contribution to climate change. It may well be that aggregate human welfare would be maximized in a warmer, wealthier world, or that the gains from climate change will offset environmental losses. Yet such claims, even if demonstrated, would not address the normative concern that the consequences of anthropogenic global warming would infringe upon the rights of people in less-developed nations. As a consequence, this paper calls for a rethinking of FME approaches to climate change policy. (shrink)

The problem which I propose to consider is not whether the distinctions past, present, future, characterize the form of time in such a way that whatever may be true concerning the reality of one of these characteristics must be equally true of the others, but the more particular question of the kind of existence which belongs to the content of the past, or its constituents as events.

For two hundred years, Americans have believed that they have an obligation to improve the lot of humanity, a belief that has consistently shaped U.S. foreign policy. Yet within this consensus, there are two competing schools of thought: the "exemplarist" school (Brands' term) which holds that what America chiefly owes the world is the benign example of a well-functioning democracy, and the "vindicationist" school which argues that force must sometimes supplement a good example. In this book, H.W. Brands traces the (...) evolution of these two schools as they emerged in the thinking and writing of the most important public thinkers of the past two centuries. (shrink)

First published in 1962, Freedom and History expresses a deep concern about freedom and the way it is imperilled by misunderstandings. Professor Lewis examines works of T.H. Green and compares Green with Locke and Rousseau.

Festschrift volume in honour of Mohd. Sabir Hussain, b. 1935.

It is argued that dispositional explanations are radically incomplete causal explanations that are employed when (1) a description of the stimuli is insufficient to account for the object's response and (2) not enough is known about the object to specify what its specific causal contribution is. ryle's failure to refer to the causal contribution of the organism in his account of dispositions is regarded as a serious weakness.

On the rights of husband and wife according to Islamic teachings.

Book reviewed in this article:F.H. Bradley, Collected Works Volumes 1–5.

The unity of the group mind is a psychoplastic unity. In the group mind subjects are integrated through an object and not objects through a subject. It follows, among many much more important consequences, that a scientific analysis and arrangement of the law relating to corporations should proceed in the manner practically indicated in the Law of Limited Companies, Corporations Sole, Trusts, Bankruptcy, Local Government, and so forth, that is to say, by the estatificatian of interests and not by the (...) pretended incorporation of people. (shrink)

This paper is a study of the consequences that follow from modeling a nonlinear and nonrelativistic quantum theory for gravitating particles. At present there exists no relativistic generalizations that do not sacrifice certain assumptions which are standard in covariant field theories.

The mind-body relation or, more particularly, the mind-brain relation 1 has been a perennial puzzle for philosophers—how can things so different be intimately related? Husserl dealt with the mind-brain relation in Section 63 of Ideen II, “Psychophysischer Parallelismus and Wechselwirkung,” 2 where he gave a critique of psychophysical parallelism. For Husserl, the mind-brain relation is to be understood not as a material or metaphysical relation, but as a relation between the presented sense or significance of two varieties of appearances. Husserl’s (...) account in this section will be examined and the following points will be discussed: (1) Husserl’s argument that the significance of brain states is basic to the full sense of a mind operating in an objective world; (2) Husserl’s view that a strict parallelism between the psyche and brain is an eidetic impossibility; (3) Husserl’s treatment of these questions, in so far as he raises but does not adequately resolve the issue, whether states of consciousness precede or follow brain states; (4) Husserl’s somewhat Cartesian failure to distinguish the phenomenological priority of consciousness from the metaphysical question of the possibility of an existent mind apart from a body. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Upshot: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic proposes that radical constructivism and info-computational (IC) processes have a synergy that can be productive. Two issues are proposed here: can constructivism help IC to model creative thinking, and can IC help constructivism to model conflict resolution?

It is easy to understand why Hegel's philosophy should be little studied by English-speaking philosophers today. Those who at the beginning of the twentieth century initiated the movement we are now caught up in presented their earliest philosophical arguments as criticisms of the prevailing Anglo-Hegelian views. It may now be thought illiberal to take much interest in this perhaps excusably slaughtered royal family, and positively reactionary to hanker after the foreign dynasty from which it sometimes claimed descent. Hegel was a (...) systematic philosopher with a scope hardly to be found today, and men who, as we say, wish to keep up with their subject may well be daunted at the idea of having to understand a way of looking at philosophy which they suspect would not repay them for their trouble anyway. Furthermore, since Hegel wrote, formal logic has advanced in ways he could not have foreseen, and has, it seems to many, destroyed the whole basis of his dialectical method. At the same time, the creation of a science of sociology, it is supposed, has rendered obsolete the philosophy of history for which Hegel was at one time admired. In countries where there are Marxist intellectuals, Hegel does get discussed as the inadvertent forerunner of historical and dialectical materialism. But in England, where there is no such need or presence, there do not seem to be any very strong ideological reasons for discussing him. In what follows I shall be asking you to direct your thoughts to certain forgotten far-off things which I hope you will find historically interesting even if you do not agree with me that they give important clues for an understanding of human nature and human society. (shrink)