Should property owners have a unique right to express their opinion just because they own property? While current law recognizes owners’ rights to express their voices in certain instances, it does not provide comprehensive and coherent answers to this question. This article provides an analytical framework for recognizing the owners’ right to voice as an independent property entitlement within the owners’ property bundle of rights and delineates its boundaries. Yet even when the owners’ voice is property-dependent, there is a difference (...) between voice that facilitates the realization of another property entitlement (such as the right to exclude, use, or trade) and voice that is constitutive to ownership in and of itself. Only the latter instances justify recognition of the owners’ right to a voice as an independent property entitlement. By examining different branches of both tangible and intellectual property law, such as inheritance law, eminent domain, homeowners’ association law, zoning law, and copyright law, this article demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed analytical framework in explaining certain parts of the current law and suggests modifications of other parts. (shrink)

The paper maps out and responds to some of the main areas of disagreement over the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: (1) Between defenders of a “two Wittgensteins” reading (which draws a sharp distinction between early and late Wittgenstein) and the opposing “one Wittgenstein” interpretation. (2) Among “two-Wittgensteins” interpreters as to when the later philosophy emerged, and over the central difference between early and late Wittgenstein. (3) Between those who hold that Wittgenstein opposes only past philosophy in order to do philosophy (...) better and those who hold that Wittgenstein aimed to bring an end to philosophy and teach us to get by without a replacement. It is shown that each of these debates depends on some deeply un-Wittgensteinian, and quite mistaken, assumptions. It is concluded that Wittgenstein’s most polished writing, most notably in Philosophical Investigations I §§ 1–425, is best understood as a kind of Pyrrhonism which aims to subvert philosophical theorizing, by means of a polyphonic dialogue. Because this delicate balance between philosophical questions and their dissolution is not achieved in most of his other published and unpublished writings, we should be very cautious when using the theories and methods we find in those other writings as a guide to reading the Philosophical Investigations. (shrink)

The Kant-Hegel relation has a continuing fascination for commentators on Hegel, and understandably so: for, taking this route into the Hegelian jungle can promise many advantages. First, it can set Hegel’s thought against a background with which we are fairly familiar, and in a way that makes its relevance clearly apparent; second, it can help us locate Hegel in the broader philosophical tradition, making us see that the traditional ‘analytic’ jump from Kant to Frege leaves out a crucial period in (...) post-Kantian thought; third, it can show Hegel in a progressive light, as attempting to take that tradition further forward; fourth, it can help us locate familiar philosophical issues in Hegelian thought that otherwise can appear wholly sui generis; and finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, focusing on this relation can help raise and crystalise some of the fascinating ambiguities concerning Hegel’s outlook, regarding whether Hegel’s response to Kant shows him to have been a reactionary, Romantic, pre-critical thinker, who sought to turn the philosophical clock back to a time before Kant had written, or a modernist, Enlightened and essentially critical one, who remained true to the spirit if not the letter of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal (...) and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable. (shrink)

Within much contemporary epistemology, Kant’s response to skepticism has come to be epitomized by an appeal to transcendental arguments. This form of argument is said to provide a distinctively Kantian way of dealing with the skeptic, by showing that what the skeptic questions is in fact a condition for her being able to raise that question in the first place, if she is to have language, thoughts, or experiences at all. In this way, it is hoped, the game played by (...) the skeptic can be turned against herself.1 At the same time, however, this appeal to transcendental arguments is also widely felt to show what is wrong with Kant’s response to skepticism: for, it is suggested, such arguments can only be made to work against the background of his transcendental idealism. As we shall see, what this doctrine amounts to is much disputed; but as with any form of idealism, the worry is that it means compromising the very realism and objectivity we want to defend against skepticism in the first place, so that the price for adopting this Kantian strategy appears too high—the cure of using transcendental arguments in conjunction with transcendental idealism is almost as bad as the disease.2 Faced with this difficulty, two kinds of response have been canvassed. On the first, it is accepted that transcendental arguments do require a commitment to the wider philosophical framework of transcendental idealism, but it is claimed that this framework can and should be defended against the suggestion that it is itself ‘‘quasi-skeptical.’’ On the second, transcendental idealism is indeed abandoned as wrongheaded, but it is held that Kant’s transcendental arguments can be made to.. (shrink)

The epistemic foundation of Hellenic-Christian thought is based on a correspondence between thought and a single reality, but the epistemic foundation of Jewish thought stresses the creative act of perspectival interpretation of an absolute text. This stress on wisdom from extracting a multiplicity of contextualized understandings of an absolute can be seen in the writings of the great rabbis, but also in the work of Jerry Seinfeld. Where Talmudic thought takes as its basis, passages of the Torah as its source (...) of truth to interpret, Seinfeld’s stand-up is neo-Talmudic in using a different source – phenomenological commonalty (our shared experience) – as its basis. The move from the stage to the small screen changed the comedy of Seinfeld as his eponymous television program now lampoons the sort of neo-Talmudic thought of his stand-up material just as the classic rabbis of Chelm jokes mock Talmudic thought. (shrink)

Ever since classical times, both Greek and Roman, friendship as a philosophical topic has been on the wane. The only notable exception is Montaigne's essay which, however, owes much to classical treatments. This decline of philosophical interest in friendship is not easy to account for. Alasdair McIntyre's overall thesis in After Virtue seemingly affords him with a ready interpretation. The progressive atomization of society, together with the concurrent growth of individualism that characterizes the modern era, claims McIntyre, are responsible for (...) the demotion of friendship from the public to the private sphere. (shrink)

Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation, by FarnethMolly. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii + 165.

Unlike most books on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language begins from the initial articulation of his thoughts in his first drafts, conversations, and lectures, and attends closely to the process of revision that led to the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. This introductory chapter provides information about the nature of the Wittgenstein papers, summarizes the rationale for reading his work in this way, and outlines the reading of the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that this approach yields. This discussion on the (...) development of Wittgenstein’s thought emphasizes the role of his changing conception of the nature of experience and its relationship to the world, the closely related problem of the relationship between ordinary language and its analysis, his later conception of the role of analogies in generating — and dissolving — philosophical problems, the parallels with psychoanalysis, and the variety of philosophical methods employed in his later philosophical writing. There is also an overview of a central theme of the book as a whole: the contrast Wittgenstein drew between “ordinary” and “philosophical” ways of looking at things when he wrote the Tractatus, and how that contrast was transformed in his subsequent writing, focusing on his contrast between “primary” and “secondary” worlds and his notion of a “phenomenological language”. (shrink)

The attempt of modern social science to follow the methods of the physical sciences in seeking verification of its theories by statistical techniques is a result of an outmoded view of the methods of the physicist. The decisive element in verifying a theory is not the amassing of large bodies of data but insightful judgment into a relatively few cases. Because the will is primary in scientific activity, scientific statements, particularly those of social science, have the same cognitive status as (...) religious and ethical beliefs. Continued disagreements are, therefore, inevitable in the social sciences. (shrink)