A great badness has entered the world; or rather, a great goodness has left it. (Well, Augustine would say those come to the same thing.) I notice that Amazon.com seems to have entirely eliminated its “Look Inside” and “Search Inside” options.
When did this happen? Why did this happen? Anybody know?
My very first publication, a 1992 book review of David Velleman’s Practical Reflection, is now online. It’s a bit more accessible to the non-philosopher than my Aristotle-on-relations review, but, well, not much.
I’m not sure how much of the review I still agree with; my more recent rejection of the impositionist/reflectionist dichotomy might raise trouble for some of the distinctions I use in the review. Or it might not; I haven’t really thought about it. (And I have no time to think about it right now!)
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
On Thursday through Saturday I and several of my colleagues will be attending SEASECS, an interdisciplinary conference on 18th-century thought. The paper I plan to present is titled “No Matter, No Master: Godwin’s Humean Anarchism.” Here’s an abstract:
William Godwin is often regarded as essentially a Berkeleyan in his metaphysics and a Rousseauvian in his social philosophy. I argue that in both areas the influence of David Hume is far more fundamental than is ordinarily recognised, and ultimately more decisive than that of Berkeley or Rousseau – though the relation is more one of Godwin’s creative repurposing of Hume’s ideas than of his passive receptivity to them.
With regard to metaphysics, although immaterialism is a Berkeleyan rather than a Humean thesis, Godwin’s version of immaterialism is flatly incompatible with Berkeley’s, and in both its epistemological foundations and its role in our reflective life owes far more to Hume than to Berkeley.
With regard to social philosophy, while Hume might seem an unlikely precursor for Godwin’s socialist anarchism, in fact Godwin, in his Enquiry and other writings, takes precisely Humean arguments for the rule of law and prevailing institutions of property and turns them in the opposite direction; and inasmuch as Hume’s account of the role of public opinion in sustaining social order inadvertently provides Godwin with grounds for the present-day feasibility of anarchism (by contrast with Rousseau’s relegation of anarchism to an irretrievable golden age), it is actually Hume, not Rousseau, who proves the most useful source for Godwin’s political program.
My book review of Pamela Hood’s Aristotle on the Category of Relation is online. If you’ve been dying to know whether Aristotle’s ontology can accommodate polyadic predicates, your long, agonising wait is now over.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
$500 and change will buy you a copy of this massive treatise in which two of my articles on Greek philosophy of law appear.
Or you can read them online for free here:
Socrates and Socratic Philosophers of Law
Hellenistic Philosophers of Law
Two caveats:
1. The first article is co-authored with R. F. Stalley, whose take on these matters is quite different from mine. He wrote essentially all the material on Socrates (with the exception of the paragraph beginning “A somewhat different solution,” which is mine) while I wrote essentially all the material on Xenophon, the Cynics, and the Cyrenaics. He’s not responsible for what I say about the Socratics, and I’m not responsible for what he says about Socrates.
2. I did not (to the best of my possibly imperfect recollection) sign any copyright agreement forbidding me to post these articles, so I’ll assume I’m free to do so unless I hear otherwise. But it’s always possible that the publisher will make me take them down; so read them now while you can.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Several people have asked for copies of my working papers “Why Libertarians Believe There Is Only One Right,” “The Racist Syndrome: Sartre, Rand, and the Will to Concreteness,” and “Stakeholder Theory for Libertarians: A Rothbardian Defense of Corporate Social Responsibility,” so I’ve decided to post them online.
These drafts were written a few years back (I actually started the stakeholder one in 1997 – prompted by my first reading of Friedman on this topic in preparation for teaching my first business ethics class when I came to Auburn) and I suspect I’ll want to word things differently when I return to revising them, but in the meantime here they are.