Most economists are committed to some version of egoism. After distinguishing among the various sorts of egoistic claims, l cite the empirical literature against psychological egoism and show that attempts to account for this data make these economists' previous empirical claims tautological. Moreover, the assumption of egoism has undesirable consequences, especially for students; if people believe that others behave egoistically, they are more likely to behave egoistically themselves. As an alternative to egoism I recommend the commitment model of Robert Frank. (...) The equivalent of egoism at the organizational level is that business firms seek (should seek) to maximize profits. I present arguments to show that a conscious attempt by managers to maximize profits is likely to fail. A committed altruism is more likely to raise profits. I suggest that a firm should take as its primary purpose providing meaningful work for employees. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider the implications for traditional philosophical ethics posed by discoveries in brain research or neurocognition as well as psychological discoveries concerning human biases and cognitive limitations presented in behavioral economics. I conclude that although there still is much for philosophical ethics to do, the empirical research shows that human freedom and responsibility for ethical decisions is somewhat diminished and that choice architecture and nudges through public policy become important for getting people to do the right thing.

Fenton et al. present a Bayesian‐network analysis of the case, using their previously developed set of building blocks (‘idioms’). They claim that these idioms, combined with their opportunity‐based method for estimating the prior probability of guilt, reduce the subjectivity of their analysis. Although their Bayesian model is less cognitively feasible than scenario‐ or argumentation‐based models, they claim that it does model the standard approach to legal proof, which is to continually revise beliefs under new evidence.

Socratic philosophy represents a long-standing tradition within philosophy that understands the journey to truth in terms of the traveler's innate capacity. Anamnesis, maieutics, and elenchus each confirm that truth is not utterly foreign but is instead always within my possession or grasp. Other people, to the extent that they participate in my philosophical exploration, serve only to enable my capabilities or potential. They are not teachers to me. Nor would I need them, since I am always already in the neighborhood (...) of truth. ;Emmanuel Levinas's description of the "face to face" encounter between people challenges the adequacy of this model. Another person is not simply a midwife who leads me to a recovery of truth that was always within me or within my domain. Rather, the Other comes to me from a dimension of height or transcendence and teaches me. By this teaching Levinas means that I, as one who might claim truth for myself, find myself put into question. Before the Other I discover that my claims to knowledge are inadequate, even unjust, insofar as the Other exceeds, and thereby resists, my comprehensive claim on the world. The Other, in other words, reveals the naivete and the dogmatism characteristic of my familiar world, and puts me on a new and unforseen path to truth. ;This dissertation, by way of an explication of the category of transcendence, examines how the autonomous world of Socratic maieutics is transformed by the teaching encounter with another person into a heteronomous world. Heteronomy suggests my answerability to an order beyond the resources of anamnesis. This answerability, which Levinas describes as my responsibility to the Other, demands that we re-examine language not in terms of its systematicity or thematic capability but as the condition for all speaking whatsoever, i.e., my being called into communication. The word of the Other signifies a transcendent domain, a domain beyond my familiar world. It also makes possible a sincere life lived to the Other. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump argues in her article in this volume that Aquinas’s theory of knowledge is not classical foundationalism, as it has sometimes seemed to be, but, instead, a version of reliabilism. I'm convinced that her thesis is important and well-supported, and it has led me to begin a re-examination of one aspect of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from the new viewpoint Stump’s work provides. I think the results tend to confirm her account while revealing further details of Aquinas’s reliabilism.My topic (...) is not reliabilism itself. Instead, I am focusing on Aquinas’s account of the reliability of the fundamental operations of the two human cognitive faculties, sense and intellect. Accounts of cognitive reliability have a place in most theories about the justification of belief, of course, and so they are found in more than one sort of epistemology; but reliabilism might be said to need them most. (shrink)

It can sometimes be that when a great artist works in a particular genre, what is done within that genre can make one see as if for the first time what that genre really is, why for centuries the genre has been important, what its logic is, and what, in the end, that genre is for. I want to suggest that this is so in the case of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and in the case of still life. Chardin’s still life painting (...) can reveal, as almost no other classical painting of still life can, what is at stake in still life, and what is that made still life one of the enduring categories of classical European painting. Understanding Chardin can force us right back to the fundamentals of the genre, to still life’s origins in antiquity, and to the extraordinary development of the genre in the seventeenth century. Here I will be trying to investigate the genre of still life in the light of what Chardin’s work reveals about it. In a sense I will be treating hardin as a critic, and not only as a painter, though everything he has to say about the genre is said in paint, and not as argument. If we can see Chardin’s work with eyes fresh enough, we can let Chardin reveal to us still life’s inner logic, its specific problems and solutions, and not only his solutions, but the solutions other still life painters look towards. In fact we probably have to turn to a painter to understand what still life is concerned with. It has always been the least discussed and the least theorised of the classical genres, and even today it is hard to find discussions of still life at a level of sophistication comparable to that of history painting, landscape, or portraiture. It is the genre farthest from language, and so the hardest for discourse to reach. There is no obvious tradition of theoretical work on still life, and in these circumstances it is appropriate to turn to a painter’s practice for guidance. But first I need to make some preliminary observations about a striking and defining feature of the genre: its exclusion of the human form, and its seeming assault on the value and prestige of the human subject. Norman Bryson is professor of comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of the series Cambridge New Art History and Criticism. He is the author of Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix and the editor of Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France . He is currently completing a study of still life painting, Looking at the Overlooked. (shrink)

This article investigates an intertwined systematic and historical view on theories of matter. It follows an approach brought forward by Hermann Weyl around 1925, applies it to recent theories of matter in physics (including geometrodynamics and quantum gravity), and embeds it into a more general philosophical framework. First, I shall discuss the physical and philosophical problems of a unified field theory on the basis of Weyl's own abandonment of his 1918 ‘pure field theory’ in favour of an ‘agent theory’ of (...) matter. The difference between agent and field theories of matter is then used to establish a sort of dialectic meta-view. With reference to Weyl this view can be understood as being a particular Fichtean transcendental idealist approach which attempts to combine the strengths of the Husserlian phenomenology and Cassirer's neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

SIECLE DES LUMIERES, HISTOIRE, 18e siècle.

The philosophy of memory has been largely dominated by what could be called ‘the representative theory of memory’. In trying to give an account of ‘what goes on in one's mind’ when one remembers something, or of what ‘the mental content of remembering’ consists, philosophers have usually insisted that there must be some sort of mental image, picture, or copy of what is remembered. Aristotle said that there must be ‘something like a picture or impression’; William James thought that there (...) must be in the mind 'an image or copy’ of the original event; Russell said that ‘Memory demands an image’. In addition to the image or copy a variety of other mental phenomena have been thought to be necessary. In order for a memory image to be distinguished from an expectation image, the former must be accompanied by ‘a feeling of pastness’. One has confidence that the image is of something that actually occurred because the image is attended by ‘a feeling of familiarity’. And in order that you may be sure that the past event not merely occurred but that you witnessed it, your image of the event must be presented to you with a feeling of ‘warmth and intimacy’. When all the required phenomena are put together, the mental content of remembering turns out to be, as William James says, ‘a very complex representation’. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is known for his attempt at including the perspective of woman in his philosophical work. His efforts received the acclaim of women philosophers, despite the fact that his philosophy remains marked by the omission of any mention to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. The topic of this paper shall not be woman, as in Derrida’s 1972 conference Spurs, but phallogocentrism. That is, the economy, dynamic and limits of this concept as a critique of history, or rather, as (...) the history of the lie, the term by which Derrida seems to conceive of the possibility of any history whatsoever. We agree that phallogocentrism in Derrida’s hands enabled anti-philosophical forays by which to include woman as singularity in the male-dominated French philosophy of the 1970s. However, we also argue that the specter of man was maintained untouched throughout Derrida’s work, thereby suggestion that deconstruction overlooked what may very well be the primary prohibition in Western thought. (shrink)

The book is a reconstruction and detailed presentation (close to a commentary) of Aristotle's lost work On Ideas, based, in the main, on the testimony of Alexander of Aphrodisias in his commentary to the Metaphysics; Alexander's text is included in the critical edition by D. Harlfinger.