_A new theory of how and why we cooperate, drawing from economics, political theory, and philosophy to challenge the conventional wisdom of game theory_ Game theory explains competitive behavior by working from the premise that people are self-interested. People don’t just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for cooperation leave much to be desired. Unlike competing players, cooperating players take those actions that they would like others to take—which Roemer (...) calls “Kantian optimization.” Through rigorous reasoning and modeling, Roemer demonstrates a simpler theory of cooperative behavior than the standard model provides. (shrink)

The authors present a materialist analysis of the effects of neoliberalism in education. Specifically, they contend that neoliberalism is a form of cultural invasion that begets necrophilia. Neoliberalism is necrophilous in promoting a cultural desire to fix fluid systems and processes. Such desire manufactures both individuals known and culturally felt experiences of alienation which are, it is argued, symptomatic of an imperialist nostalgia that permeates educational policy and practice. The authors point to ‘unschooling in schools’ as a mechanism for resisting (...) the necrophilous tendencies of contemporary formations of education. (shrink)

This work is an exploration of divine command theory, which is the theory that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it.

This review of Martin Jay’s recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of (...) paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process. (shrink)

John E. Smith; XI—Radical Empiricism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 205–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

Professor Roemer's goal in this book is to give a rigorous view of classical Marxian economic theory by presenting specific analytic models. The theory is not extended to deal with new problems, but it is deepened: Marxian theory is given micro-foundations and upon those foundations the author begins to rebuild a tightly constructed Marxian economics. The book begins, after a methodological introduction, with an examination of the Marxian notion of equilibrium and the theory of exploitation, and goes on to deal (...) with the theory of the falling rate of profit. The next section explores one of the points made in the first section of the book, that the Marxian theory of exploitation can be constructed completely independently of the labor theory of value as a theory of exchange. Technical study of this problem allows comment on various issues, such as the relative importance of 'marginal utilities' and 'class struggle' in determining relative prices. The final part examines models of various Marxian concepts. (shrink)

Author John E. Rexine expounds on the theologies of the great Roman thinkers Plato and Cicero in this essay.

Public support for and interest in various fields, issues, organizations, and situations change. Public support for and interest in science and science education have been studied over a thirty-year period. Yankelovich's work related to science was enlarged to include science education. The public was very supportive of science and science education following the 1957 lauching of the Soviet Sputnik This high level of support is observed again in 1985, presumably because of the relationship of science and technology to economic security. (...) Public support for science and science education was at a low point for the 30 year period in 1975. (shrink)

Examines Adam Smith's main principles in Wealth of Nations as the basis for effective policymaking. Adam Smith proposed several principles that would help mitigate or eliminate some of the problems we face as a nation today. Many assume that our current laissez-faire capitalism applies his principles. But, in contrast to the libertarianism of the United States, Smith's recipe to increase everyone's wealth and happiness was justice, liberty, and equality. This book examines Adam Smith's main principles in Wealth of Nations as (...) the basis for effective policymaking. Adam Smith wanted to increase happiness through this formula for a good life: equality, liberty, and justice. Free market interpretations of Smith, the book argues, grossly misrepresent his thought, emphasizing only liberty and not also equality and justice. This book suggests policies that combine all three in order for happiness to be maximized. (shrink)

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical (...) treatment of religious concerns. (shrink)

Examines Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788-1860) conception of human agency and responsibility, his unique ethics of the morally virtuous character, and his assessment of life as fundamentally suffering. This title focuses on his contention that the human will and the human body cannot have a cause and effect relationship with each other.

A nonfoundationalist reading of Fides et Ratio, both in its negative regard for Enlightenment reasoning and its implicit understanding of the philosophical task of justifying belief, enables an appreciation of the encyclical as a particular kind of post-Enlightenment Roman Catholic stance. A nonfoundationalist perspective, understood as a philosophical position on the justification of belief, can be instructive in the encyclical’s articulation of Credo ut intelligam. Fides et Ratio offers a contextualized understanding of justification in its treatment of universality that can (...) only be recognized, affirmed and confessed within the particularity of faith. (shrink)

Teaching about homosexuality, especially in a positive light, has long been held to be a controversial issue. There is, however, a view of the capacity for reason that finds that those who deem homosexuality to be controversial will ultimately contradict themselves, becoming unreasonable. By this standard of reason, homosexuality should be treated as non controversial in schools. In this essay, John Petrovic argues that this epistemic position is problematic. Instead, he defends a Deweyan epistemology that casts reason as, in (...) part, a set of socially acquired habits of mind. People who have been socialized into heterosexist habits of mind must be exposed to counterhegemonic discourses. One such discourse can be found in the public values of liberal democracy through which the practice of reason must be pursued. Petrovic discusses the practical guidance provided by assuming a view of normative reason versus habituated reason in terms of both pedagogy and curriculum. (shrink)

During the last 40 years, political philosophers have made important advances in our understanding of why equality is valuable, and what kind of equality is important. This article summarizes the development of these ideas, in particular, the contributions of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Richard Arneson, and G. A. Cohen. It shows how these ideas have filtered into economic thinking in the conceptualization of equality of opportunity. It concludes with a brief discussion of how these ideas (...) might be extended to evaluate intergenerational and global distributions of income or welfare. (shrink)

Although Paton depends for his materials on virtually all of Kant's writings on moral philosophy, he makes the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten central to his analysis. This is a wise choice and one that is defensible since Paton has set for himself the task of elucidating the categorical imperative and it is in the Grundlegung that Kant sought to grasp the supreme principle of morality and its appearance to us as a categorical imperative. Despite the fact that, as the (...) author points out on many occasions, the Grundlegung neither stresses morality from the standpoint of action, nor does it deal in detail with many significant problems, it must nevertheless always be looked upon as central to Kant's ethics just because it does deal with the supreme principle as a categorical imperative. The seemingly more authoritative Critique of Practical Reason is more definitely concerned with the larger subject of reason in its practical employment and does not deal as directly with Paton's special concern as the Grundlegung does. (shrink)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like (...) that," he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)