One currently popular methodology of metaphysics has it that ‘intuitions’ play an evidential role with respect to metaphysical claims. This chapter defends a realist methodology of metaphysics that implies that any rational being, simply in virtue of being rational, is necessarily capable of grasping the essences of at least some mind-independent entities. The notion of essence in play here is Aristotelian, whereby an entity’s essence is captured by an account of what that entity is, or what it is to be (...) that entity. Concepts are just ways of thinking of things and, as such, may or may not be adequate to the real natures — the essences — of the things being thought of. Our ‘intuitions’, particularly as revealed by aptly constructed thought experiments, may cast interesting light on some of our concepts, but they are not and cannot be reliable guides to mind-independent truths of essence. (shrink)

The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD 17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of what was best and most stimulating (...) in earlier Greek and Roman writing, charged with new and original life by the individual genius of, most particularly, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Augustan literature, conventionally viewed as the expression in writing of the age itself - political and social stability reflected in artistic equilibrium - turns out on a close and critical reading to have been subject to the same stresses and strains as the society in and for which it was produced. In appraising the monumental literary achievements of the age the underlying tensions and contradictions are not ignored. The critical discussions in this volume do full justice to the complexity and subtlety of the literature itself. (shrink)

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.

This article shows how attention to a third political discourse -- mercantilist thought -- provides a direct understanding of the issues of commerce and market relations in the framing and ratification of the constitution drafted at the Philadelphia convention in 1787. Mercantilist political discourse was readily employable alongside the republican, liberal and other political languages already studied at greater length. In contrast to the vagueness of classical republican references to �commerce�, which made it a metaphor for entire social and political (...) orders, mercantilist thought enabled Anglo-Americans to be precise and elaborate in discussing economic relations in political contexts. Mercantilist thought provided a positive analysis of market activities, but it simultaneously forestalled a complete identification of liberty with economic self-interest. By assuming that economic regulation might serve a public interest, mercantilist thought allowed the hypothetical possibility that regulation of the market need not be a compromise of freedom in a republic. (shrink)

Asks whether science can give any hope that some of our being will survive after death, challenging accepted views of mortality.

What kinds of things can we be morally responsible for? Andrew Khoury offers an answer that includes (i) an argument for the impossibility of blameworthiness for overt action, and (ii) the assertion that “willings are the proper object of responsibility in the context of action”. After presenting an argument for the inconsistency of Khoury’s answer to our focal question, I defend the following partial answer that resembles, but differs importantly from, Khoury’s answer: one can be blameworthy for a practical decision—that (...) is, an essentially intentional momentary mental action of forming an intention to do something that resolves prior felt unsettledness about what to do. (shrink)