This news is nearly a year old now, but Geoff Plauché’s excellent dissertation is online. It combines Aristotelean eudaimonism, Austrian praxeology, dialectical libertarianism, Ayn Rand, New Left anti-corporatism, and free-market anarchism. (So, nothing that would interest any readers of this blog ….)
It’s on my Kindle and ready to read.
Thanks for the plug, Roderick!
Oh, btw, my blog has moved from veritasnoctis.blogspot.com to http://www.veritasnoctis.net/blog.
Noted and changed.
An amusing fact from wikipedia: Apparently in the US and British common laws it is no defense to prosecution for the crime to be impossible to commit. Thus, attempting to steal from an empty pocket is still considered the same crime as if something was actually stolen from a full pocket:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoate_offense#Impossibility
The article outlines several cases of defendants harming people who were already dead, or shooting at buildings mistakenly believed to have people inside.
It’s not that one is still guilty of the crime, but that one is guilty of an attempted crime (aka inchoate offences). The ‘thief’ who ‘steals’ from the empty pocket is not guilty of theft but of attempted theft.
Yes but it’s obviously not just from a libertarian perspective is what I was getting at. For example if you steal your own umbrella mistakenly thinking it is somebody else’s, then there is no victim and hence no crime.
True, true.
Just using the little legal knowledge I have to be a pedant!
I’d forgotten he was writing a diss., but I am glad to hear it’s online!
It’s been a little while now. I’m just saying…
http://aaeblog.com/2009/01/25/the-atrocity-of-hope/comment-page-1/#comment-349072
Time is relative; in some reference frames that was only a few minutes ago.