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.
Tag Archives | Personal
Anarchist Anthology Advenes Auspiciously
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
A nice birthday present came in the mail today: my anthology with Tibor, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, hot off the presses. It looks very nice. (Well, at 40¢ a page, it’d better!)
The book features contributions from a variety of philosophical perspectives within libertarianism, including consequentialist, deontological, contractarian, Randian, and Hayekian approaches.
The contents:
PART 1: MINARCHISM
1. Why the State Needs a Justification – Lester H. Hunt
2. Libertarianism, Limited Government and Anarchy – John Roger Lee
3. Rationality, History, and Inductive Politics – Adam Reed
4. Objectivism against Anarchy – William R Thomas
5. Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism – Tibor R. Machan
PART 2: ANARCHISM
6. Radical Freedom and Social Living – Aeon James Skoble
7. The State: From Minarchy to Anarchy – Jan Narveson
8. The Obviousness of Anarchy – John Hasnas
9. Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism – Roderick T. Long
10. Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism – Charles Johnson
It strikes me that four of the ten contributors have some connection to the Auburn Philosophy Department. Tibor and I are Professor Emeritus and Associate Professor, respectively; Aeon was an Instructor here in 1993-1994; and Charles was an undergrad philosophy major here, graduating in 2003.
The Radiance that Streams Immortally from the Door of the Law
[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.
The Empire Rises Again
You may have noticed an error message when trying to reach my blog these past several days. Yahoo assured me that they were trying to fix the problem. It seems they have – for the moment, knock on wood, and all that.
I was unable to cross-post here my recent L&P post Strangers on a Train, but here it is now:
Charles Johnson had a good post the other day questioning the extent to which anarchists and minarchists are really “on the same train”; he has an even better follow-up now. I note especially his comparison of the track records of electoral versus counter-economic means in combating immigration controls.
(I would link to his post from my own blog as well, but it’s not there right now, and hasn’t been for a couple of days. Yahoo tells me they’re “investigating the problem.”)
Check out also a discussion of the meaning of “war criminal” in the comments section of another L&P post.
Will Keith Halderman Back Up His Charge?
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I’ve argued that the decision as to whether to support Ron Paul’s candidacy involves a trade-off between long-term and short-term gains; that there is no one rationally compulsory way for libertarians to resolve this trade-off; that my own commitments give me reason not to support his candidacy, but that nevertheless I wish him success.
Keith Halderman evidently thinks I am lying. That is, he apparently believes not only that my position as described above is mistaken (which of course it may well be) but that it is not my real position. Or so I infer from a recent L&P thread in which he writes, addressing me:
let us be clear about this, your time preference is not to ignore Paul’s effort because you do not think he can succeed, your time preference is to actively work against his success
This is a surprising assertion. After all, here’s a sampling of my remarks about Ron Paul over the past year (from posts here, here, here, and here):
1. Most of my libertarian comrades seem to think that Ron Paul is either a) the Second Coming, or b) the Apocalypse. … I’m somewhere in between: I have a lot of serious problems with his candidacy, but I admit I’m also gratified every time I see his poll numbers rising.
2. I have plenty of problems with Ron Paul – most notably on immigration, abortion, and gay rights. But he is astronomically superior to any other Republican candidate out there; I wish him well, and hope he shakes up the GOP plenty.
3. I neither endorse nor oppose Paul (I disagree with him on too many issues to officially “endorse” him; but I vastly prefer him to all his rivals and thus wish his campaign well).
4. Paul, despite his deviations, would likely pursue policies whose direct results would be significantly more libertarian than otherwise. … I think that’s a reason to hope he does well, and I do hope he does well. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if there were a button such that pushing it would guarantee Paul’s election … then I would happily push it.
5. I don’t support Ron Paul’s candidacy, then, because my own talents, proclivities, and commitments lie with the Agorist and left-libertarian projects, and I value the promotion of those projects over the short-term benefits that Paul’s candidacy might gain at the expense of those projects. But I can’t see that this preference is compulsory for everybody. Even if every libertarian ought to be an Agorist and a cultural lefty … it seems to me that it does not follow that every libertarian ought to make the trade-off between those long-run projects and the possible short-run gains from Paul’s candidacy the same way I do.
I think it’s fairly clear, then, that my position is not fairly describable as “to actively work against his success.” Keith Halderman’s description of my position is baseless.
I’ve repeatedly asked him to offer evidence for his claim, but so far he has made no response. Well, perhaps he hasn’t looked in the comments section to his last post lately. So I’m moving my query to L&P’s main page.
Keith, please either back up your charge or retract it.
How I Became a Republican
I’ve joined a group blog called Public Reason; it’s for professional political philosophers and is mostly limited topic-wise to such matters as “check out this upcoming conference,” “check out my new working paper,” and “hey, what’s a good way to explain Fichte to an intro class?” So it’s not a high-volume blog – but if you’re in the profession you might want to get involved.
To oversimplify somewhat, it’s set up so that profs can post and comment, grad students can only comment, and everybody else can just read the wisdom of the first two groups. So it’s kinda like Plato’s Republic.