The critique of philosophical foundations of neoclassical economics is significant, because of its hegemony on economic education and research programs in Iran and worldwide academies. Due to an epistemological fallacy, methodological individualism plays a prominent role in the philosophy of economic; since the ontological aspects of economy are reduced to methodological considerations. Accordingly, critique of methodological individualism is regarded as the main entry for philosophical analysis of neoclassical economics. This article aims to analyze and appraise the methodological individualism from critical (...) realism’s point of view. Critical realism is taken as a stand for criticizing methodological individualism, because critical realism and neoclassical economics as a positive approach to economics, both share a realistic worldview. The critical realism’ critique of methodological individualism is bases on analyzing the concepts of formalism, syllogism, social atomism, isolation and reduction. From critical realism’ point of view because of unrealistic postulations of methodological individualism, neoclassical economics is turned to an abstract and deductive science such as mathematics with a low potentiality of explanation. (shrink)

ch. 1. Istorii︠a︡ sot︠s︡iologicheskikh ucheniĭ -- ch. 2. Nauchnai︠a︡ teorii︠a︡ obshchestva.

Jonathan Dancy charges that Hutcheson's distinction between justifying reasons and motivating reasons is unimportant: it is simply between moral reasons and other good reasons. I argue that the distinction is between propositions with different presuppositions and different functions. One identifies qualities of objects that we desire; the other identifies qualities that we approve. I situate Hutcheson in the current debate about the nature of practical reasons. I argue that he avoids problems posed for factivists and for Humeans. On Hutcheson's view, (...) motivating and justifying reasons at times refer to the same qualities, which makes it possible for one to serve the function of the other. (shrink)

Louis Frédéric Ancillon was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres whose imagined dialogue between Berkeley and Hume was read to the Academy in 1796 and published in 1799. It is important as an indicator of the reception of Hume and Berkeley in francophone philosophical circles in late eighteenth-century Prussia. Our introduction is followed by an English translation with notes.

ABSTRACT:Daniel Callahan died on July 16, 2019, just short of his 89th birthday. In the years since, we have seen the overturning of abortion rights, a concern central to his scholarship and musings about the place of religion in American civic life. Callahan’s journey from lay Catholic journalist and commentator at Commonweal to a co-founder of the Hastings Center, during his decade of doubt, is especially relevant today as America revisits established precedent governing a woman’s right to choose. His life-long (...) struggle with faith and the secularization of bioethics is a story worth telling, as it may foster dialogue across a divide between religious and laical thinkers that has fractured our political discourse. We recall Callahan’s misgivings about the marginalization of religious perspectives in public life; he sought not the denial of complexity nor of difference in views, but rather the importance of free and honest debate around deeply held beliefs, contextualized in the realities of the contemporary world. Callahan’s ambivalence about his faith remains a part of the fabric of American life, a story that Callahan chronicled to our collective benefit for over a half-century. (shrink)

Classical commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, aphoristic work on Vedanta.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the role (...) of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

Hobbes would say that this level of apprehension is inevitable in any society that isn't governed by a sufficiently powerful central ruler. Just as in our world, some people or groups would have more power than others, and some of these might have more power than most. The Emperor would still be subject to the demands of the Spacing Guild, for example, while the Spacing Guild would still need to be on good terms with the governor of Arrakis because of (...) the Guild's absolute dependence upon spice. In a world like this, it would be difficult not to see potential threats around every corner, and with good reason. And in this state of wariness, political and social stability will be tough to attain. Hobbes had seen firsthand the terrible destruction that civil war could unleash, the horrific loss of life and destruction of security. (shrink)

In his last papers about deontic logic, von Wright sustained that there is no genuine logic of norms. We argue in this paper that this striking statement by the father of deontic logic should not be understood as a death sentence to the subject. Rather, it indicates a profound change in von Wright's understanding about the epistemic and ontological role of logic in the field of norms. Instead of a logical constructivism of deontic systems revealing a necessary structure of prescriptive (...) discourse, which marked his earlier efforts, he adopted the view that such systems should be seem as mere objects of comparison, i.e. as providing practical standards of rationality for normgiving activity. Within such view he proposed an interpretation of standard deontic logic in such a way to free deontic logicians from the philosophical difficulties related to the so-called Jørgensen's dilemma and deontic paradoxes. This effort, as we claim in the present paper, is an application of Wittgenstein's therapeutic method to dissolve philosophical difficulties caused by the use of logical tools to model relations between norms. (shrink)

It is my contention here that the chapter “Of Power,” in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is not a metaphysical pronouncement upon the liberty-necessity debates but more along the lines of what those like James Harris portray it to be: a description of our experience of freedom of the will. It is also prescriptive since it is descriptive of the right use of the will. My claims are based upon two key pieces of evidence that are responses to (...) William Molyneux’s oft noted critique of the first edition of the chapter: 1) an admission by Locke in his correspondence: at least part of the reason he is attempting to avoid metaphysical pronouncements is that trying to reconcile divine and human agency is too difficult; and 2) the theological message of “Of Power”—the truly free agent is reasonable, and the truly reasonable agent will have her eyes fixed on the afterlife, thus aiming for herself to be a slave and determined, therefore, by her ever-cultivated desire for righteousness and not by her fleshly desires—and his development of it throughout the chapter eludes sectarian categorization by the avoidance of theological issues that are not unrelated to the metaphysical question of human free agency. To frame his chapter otherwise makes him out to be a theological novice or, perhaps, unconcerned with the religious background of his readership. (shrink)