Part intellectual autobiography and part exposition of complex yet contemporary economic ideas, this lively conversation with renowned scholar and public intellectual Kenneth J. Arrow focuses on economics and politics in light of history, current events, and philosophy as well. Reminding readers that economics is about redistribution and thus about how we treat each other, Arrow shows that the intersection of economics and ethics is of concern not just to economists but for the public more broadly. With a foreword by (...) Amartya Sen, this book highlights the belief that government can be a powerful force for good, and is particularly relevant in the current political climate and to the lay reader as well as the economist. (shrink)

This book is written for the non-philosophy major taking 'Contemporary Moral Issues' or 'Intro to Ethics' courses. It provides a method to research any complex moral issue in hundreds of print, periodical, and Internet research sources, and gives a model of the method applied to the question of capital punishment.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the navya-Nyaya school of indian philosophy determines the truth or falsity of a sentence which contains an empty term, And to point out some similarities and differences between its method of analysis and truth-Value determinations of such sentences and that of bertrand russell.

One of the central questions of economics relates to the coordination of individual units within a large organization to achieve the central objectives of that organization. This book examines the problems involved in allocating resources in an economic system where decision-making is decentralized into the hands of individuals and individual enterprises. The decisions made by these economic agents must be coordinated because the input decisions of some must eventually equal the output decisions of others. Coordination arises naturally out of the (...) mathematical theory of optimization but there is still the question of how it can be achieved in practice with dispersed knowledge. The essays here explore the many facets of this problem. Nine papers are grouped under the title 'Economies with a single maximand'. They include papers on static and dynamic optimization, decentralization within firms, and nonconvexities in optimizing problems. Fourteen papers are concerned with 'Economies with multiple objectives'. Among the topics covered here are stability of competitive equilibrium, stability in oligopology, and dynamic shortages. The final part of the book includes three papers on informational efficiency and informationally decentralized systems. Leonid Hurwitcz is the Nobel Prize Winner 2007 for The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with colleagues Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, for his work on the effectiveness of markets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Horatius: The Man and the HourKenneth J. ReckfordTrimalchio’s projected monumentum in Petronius’ Satyricon will include, among other ill-assorted designs, a sundial: horologium in medio, ut quisquis horas inspiciet, velit nolit, nomen meum legat (71). Horace too, I argue, connects his name with the passing hours: more subtly and modestly than Trimalchio, but also more significantly, in a recurrent play of sounds and words.That Roman poets and orators exploited puns (...) on names, especially cognomina, is well known; but although scholars have noted scattered name-puns in Horace’s poetry (some of which will be mentioned here), the important play on Horatius/hora has been ignored, and any argument seeking to restore it to general consciousness must rely on probabilities: somewhat subjective ones, to be sure, yet which carry a certain cumulative conviction. I begin by discussing Satires 2.6, where Horace is most clearly involved in the horae, and then proceed through a wide range of hora references, most notably in Odes 4.6. A code on Vergilius/ver will provide a friendly parallel. I hope in all this to suggest that Horace plays on his own redende Name not just for occasional fun, but as a way of asserting, and sometimes exploring, his personal identity beneath the shifting personae of his life and craft.Hora Quota Est? (Satires 2.6.44)The question hora quota est? is given as an example of small talk, safely “entrusted” to Horace’s “leaky ear”:septimus octavo propior iam fugerit annus ex quo Maecenas me coepit habere suorum in numero, dumtaxat ad hoc, quem tollere raeda vellet iter faciens et cui concredere nugas hoc genus, “hora quota est? Thraex est Gallina Syro par? matutina parum cautos iam frigora mordent”: et quae rimosa bene deponuntur in aure. per totum hoc tempus subiectior in diem et horam invidiae noster....(40–48) [End Page 583]As if he were giving a public interview, Horace carefully and humorously delimits his relationship with Maecenas. He is an occasional, amusing companion, not a privileged insider. In Satires 1.6 he had distinguished his personal and social acceptance within Maecenas’ circle, where true merit is honored, from those political ambitions from which—in the blind, prejudiced world of Roman politics—a freedman’s son must normally be barred. In Satires 2.6 he goes further. He is not (he alleges) really intimate with Maecenas, certainly not to the point of sharing inside information about, e.g., the Dacian threat or plans to resettle veterans in Southern Italy or Sicily. He is nothing like the confidential friend described by Ennius, “with whom he [the great man] often and gladly shares his table, his conversation, and the giving and taking of advice about his affairs” (rerumque suarum consilium) and “to whom he would speak out confidently” (audacter) about great things or small, good things or bad, all “vomited forth” carelessly, yet “safely deposited” (evomeret... tutoque locaret), and “with whom [he would share] many pleasures.” 1We may suspect that Horace played the role of just such a confidential friend to Maecenas, and played it well. 2 We may also suspect that while he regaled that first audience of insiders with the comic narrative of his daily frustrations in Rome, he was also reassuring Maecenas—to everyone’s amusement, as with the earlier “Journey to Brundisium”—that he did not have, precisely, a leaky ear. One resulting and more than simply dramatic irony is that today’s reader must identify with those importunate street people who were teased, baffled, and insulted by Horace’s silence. I want, however, to argue here for a second irony involving the offhand question hora quota est? which may mean a good deal more to Horace, Maecenas, and ourselves than first appears [End Page 584] on the surface—much as Falstaff’s opening question to the Prince, “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” proves fatally relevant to the affairs of Hal and Hotspur, Falstaff and the King, in Henry IV, Part 1. 3“What time is it?” The Romans did not wear watches. Their sense of time, even with sundials, was very inexact by modern standards. Because they had hours (roughly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Only a Wet Dream? Hope and Skepticism in Horace, Satire 1.5Kenneth J. ReckfordLong enjoyed as an entertainment piece, Horace’s “Trip to Brundisium” has continued to baffle its readers by recounting trivialities while ignoring politics. A brief, tactful hint at great affairs is quickly abandoned:huc venturus erat Maecenas optimus atque Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque legati, aversos soliti componere amicos. hic oculis ego nigra meis collyria lippus illinere. interea (...) Maecenas advenit...(S. 1.5.27–31)In his first hic ego (7), Horace missed dinner because of stomach trouble. In the second (30), he misses Maecenas’ arrival—and its meaning—because of eye trouble. Is he unable to see what is going on around him? 1Horace’s persona in Satires 1.5 is well crafted: the naive, good-humored traveling companion, concerned primarily with his own intrusive comforts and discomforts. He likes good food, drink, and sleep, good health and good company, and he especially enjoys his friends: nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico (44). He was taken along, it would appear, rather passively from the first (egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma), on a mission that had something to do with “reconciling [End Page 525] friends” who had fallen out. That is all he knows, and all he needs to know. 2We may well suspect that Horace was keeping a diplomatic silence, that Maecenas confided in him, here and elsewhere, precisely because he did not have a “leaky ear.” 3 He would be teasing, then: teasing prospective readers who would suspect that he was withholding privileged information with intent to annoy, and (rather beyond his intent?) teasing modern scholars who cannot even take the satire’s date for granted, let alone follow the diplomatic maneuvers of Octavian and Antony in 38-37 B.C. 4 If we follow Horace’s lead, all those amusing particulars that render the political picture so opaque convey us insistently into the “little world” of poetry, friendship, and simple human satisfactions. It is tempting to confine our attention to this “little world,” accepting Horace at face value as an amiable entertainer, with brief excursions, perhaps, into comparing the esthetics of his narrative with the reconstructed narrative of the casually autobiographical Lucilius—an attempt that, from insufficient evidence, must also end in frustration. But there is more. I propose here that the poem is both more public and more private than it seems. Reading between the lines, though without abusing allegory, we find Horace deeply implicated in issues of war and peace. Through the distorting lens of the satiric and comic imagination he portrays how a sensitive and thoughtful person might waver between hope for a peaceful, even “friendly” resolution of conflict and skepti-cal awareness of the gap between personal wish-fulfillment (the “wet [End Page 526] dream” of my title) and political reality. Yet this same wavering, and Horace’s consequent, very human vacillation between emotional involvement with Rome and Epicurean disengagement, are the stuff of which genuine poetry—and, consistently over time and through different genres, Horatian poetry—is made.My argument focuses on three aspects of Satire 1.5: the theme of amicitia, private and public; the agon, or insult-match between Sarmentus the scurra and Messius Cicirrus; and the “wet dream” and “failed miracle” sequences toward the end. But first, because Horace’s satires are in part exploratory, like all good poetry, and because meanings notoriously shift as a work progresses in time and is made available to different audiences or circles of readers, I begin with a hypothetical framework consisting of (1) the occasion and first plan, (2) the sketching-out and refining of the satire, (3) its first reading(s) to friends, and (4) its first publication in book form. Further questions of reader reception and the organization of the libellus are deferred until the close of the essay.Hypothetical Stages Of Composition And Reception(1) The poem is conceived. We begin with the happy conjunction of two opportunities (kairoi), Roman and Horatian. The larger kairos involves the diplomatic mission of 37, a renewed attempt to prevent (or postpone) conflict between Octavian and Antony, to settle their differences, and to provide... (shrink)

I find three major shortcomings in Mele's account. First, verbal ambiguities suggest that the analysis is irrelevant to self-deception and/or that the traditional conception is subtly reinstated. Second, the data offer no means of establishing the superiority of the present account. Finally, as political rhetoric, Mele's proposal not only operates to disqualify others, but establishes science as their judge.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes, and: Horace: Behind the Public PoetryKenneth ReckfordRonnie Ancona. Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1994. xii + 186Cloth, $39.95.R. O. A. M. Lyne. Horace: Behind the Public Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. viii + 230 pp. Cloth, $30.Horace’s love poetry has generally been undervalued, if not actively disliked. In (...) the bad old days, as Ancona reminds us, he was simply charged with not being Catullus or Propertius; and although the New Critics appreciated his refined irony and playfulness, they still treated him as somewhat of a kinsman of the fairy queen in Iolanthe, who proclaims,On fire that glows with heat intense I turn the hose of common sense.Ancona doubly disturbs the stereotype. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, she traces the recurrent Horatian figure of the (male) poet-lover whose drive for autonomy and control leads him to resist any form of desire that enforces immersion in temporality; and she argues, too, that (mostly male) scholars have privileged that attitude by identifying with it and taking it for granted. The thesis is challenging, it is well argued, and it serves Horace well.Throughout her careful, often elegant analysis of fourteen odes, Ancona traces the poet-lover’s “desperate refusal to situate his own identity in any real relation to the uncontrollable temporality of the beloved” (13). I summarize, baldly, a few results. (1) His desire as he ages is a private sorrow, or even a bid for power (Odes 4.1); hers is a public embarrassment and disgrace (Odes 1.25). (2) He tries vainly to defeat time through imaginings of permanence in nature, or self-identification with youthful eroticism (Odes 1.4) or fantasies of erotic domination (Odes 1.9, 2.9). Or (3): the beloved woman or boy must not be seen as quite real, if the poet-lover’s integrity is to be maintained (Odes 1.22, 2.5). Only in Odes 1.13 and, more compellingly, in the duet of Odes 3.9 does Horace envisage the (to be sure, very distant) possibility of a genuinely evolving love, with both lovers submitting equally to the challenges of time and change.If her results are challenging—and I shall not read Integer Vitae, or Cum tu Lydia, Telephi, or Donec gratus eram tibi so complacently ever again—Ancona’s argument is built from the ground up in ways that reassure the philologist. Her readings are precise and accurate. She is sensitive to Horace’s poetic strategies, his indirections of technique. Ancona acknowledges her debt to earlier critics. Her analyses of Odes 1.23, 1.25, 2.8, 2.9, 3.7, and 4.13 should be required reading for the next generation.Two minor caveats. Ancona’s reading of Odes 1.13 hinges on the interpretation of irrupta... copula as, not “an unbroken bond,” but “an interrupted bond” that yet holds over time and change: a philologically and humanly daring oxymoron. At Odes 3.9.10 I see a strong sexual challenge inscribed in dulcis [End Page 657] docta modos et citharae sciens. Sex and music go together, and Chloe plays well. All the more reason for Lydia, in the next stanza, to turn up the heat.More generally, I wonder whether behind such controlling Horatian personas as the erotodidaskalos of Odes 3.23—a more sensitive, Roman Anacreon—we may not sense the person of a Horace who is remarkably open to the same mysteries of time and change from which his “Horace” so often, and so vainly, struggles to escape? This Horace of mine (let me, this once, be controlling) recognizes Venus as an irreducible power in life and responds to “time and the erotic” with more self-awareness, more passion, and more poetic excitement than has ordinarily been heard in the Odes. To have revived that sense, which I think we share, of ongoing excitement and challenge in the odes on love—though the aesthetic can itself (as in Odes 2.5) be a refuge from life’s changes—is Ancona’s last, best... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 641-644 [Access article in PDF] Erich Segal. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv + 589 pp. Cloth, $35. "In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries," says the jacket blurb, "Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its beginnings... to Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive [End Page (...) 641] examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd." I agree, in part: It's a grand tour, after the fashion of Segal's Dionysian Ivy-League lectures, mixing pleasure with instruction and reminding the reader of comedy's changing devices, delights, and powers in the different periods and locales in which Segal has made himself comfortably at home. He doesn't, of course, "fully illustrate"—and I don't think he's gotten comedy's "life cycle" quite right, especially that titular death. Rival comedy tour guides like myself will question this or that judgment call, especially in their specialties (and still more when their own supremely valuable writings go unacknowledged). Yet there is much to praise in this highly readable, highly entertaining book, which I shall happily put on the reserve shelf next time I teach Honors 28 ("Comedy and Satire") to my laughter-loving sophomores and juniors at UNC.Segal's first 250 pages, more than half the book, take us from comedy's hypothetical beginnings in holiday fun and revelry to Terence's beleaguered Hecyra. To the usual etymologies of "revel-" and "country-song" (from komos and kome) he adds the less familiar "nightsong" (from koma, "sleep"), anticipating the prominent place of dreamlike disguises, confusions, and misadventures in comedy and in the human unconscious as explored by Freud. In subsequent chapters, Segal sketches the rise and fall of Old Comedy, which reaches new heights in the imaginatively playful erections of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Peace, and Birds, thenceforth declining towards Middle Comedy as sex gives way to money, Phales to Plutus. A chapter on Euripides' Ion entitled "The Comic Catastrophe" (why not "Eucatastrophe"?) provides a helpful bridge to the familial concerns and dramatic conventions of the New Comedy of Menander. From there, pivoting on Plautus and Terence, Segal follows "the evolution and transmutations of the classical literary form" (256), from Machiavelli and Marlowe, through Shakespeare, Molière, Jonson, Wycherley, and Beaumarchais, to what he regards as its foul and unnatural murder by the Surrealists and Absurdists of the last century—even as the beginning of Beckett's Waiting for Godot ironically completes a great circle by recalling the beginning of Aristophanes' Birds.Through all this, Segal keeps up a good, brisk pace. He chooses his plays well, discussing them with a skillful mix of plot summary, paraphrase, quotation (the good, clear translations are his own), and lively running commentary. As classicists, we readers of AJP will have our professional quibbles, our personal bones to pick (some of them juicy) about Aristophanes' Clouds (underrated by Segal), say, or Terence's borrowings from Plautus (which he plays down); but we are amateurs, too, more easily pleased when it comes to Shakespeare or Molière. Here, two of Segal's leitmotifs seem most effective and affecting: First, the dreamlike movement of events in Comedy of Errors (after Menaechmi, but we should add Amphitruo for the twice-doubling) and in Twelfth Night, drifting out of shipwreck, through confusion of identity approaching nightmare and madness, to the komos and gamos of festive comedy—or is it Freudian wish-fulfillment?; second, the sad clown or playwright, poor old cuckolded Molière, pushing to his life's very [End Page 642] end the comic enactments of cuckoldry, sickness, aging, and (near) death. Which reminds me, painfully, of what a difference it would make to our overly naive or sophisticated readings of Aristophanes or Terence if we knew more, even a little more, about their life and work than the usual, all too meager hearsay.Like his beloved Plautus, Segal... (shrink)

Responds to the reviews by K. O'Doherty and J. W. Clegg of the current author's book, Relational being: Beyond self and community . One of my chief reactions to the resistances represented in these reviews is that the volume failed to make clear a vision of how we might go on together in the academic world where different viewpoints dominate. To elaborate: both reviewers take issue with my relational account in terms of its seeming dismissal or eradication of cherished concepts—including (...) for Clegg, personal experience, genuine selfknowledge, and independent moral agency; and for O’Doherty, individual awareness, agency, and causality. In a certain sense their resistances are justified. My account raises critical concerns with such concepts, and in certain cases offers a radical reconceptualization. Both reviewers also suggest that these are questions of fundamental ontology, and offer arguments against what they see as my faulty foundations. However, as I tried to explain in the work, I approach theory development from a social constructionist perspective. This means replacing the traditional goal of the theorist to “tell the truth” about the world, with the attempt to generate an intelligibility that may foster different—and possibly more viable—forms of life. In effect, I am not attempting to articulate a final philosophy; I neither propose nor wish to argue ontology. From a constructionist perspective such arguments are futile; on what grounds other than those we construct could we settle such differences? Now to be fair, both Clegg and O’Doherty recognize this constructionist background, and my attempt to avoid eliminating alternative traditions or conceptions. However, this recognition does not deter them from returning to questions of fundamentals; they seem to want a knock-down conflict in which “justified true belief” will win out. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)