An articulate and passionate argument against the postmodern/postraditionalist abandonment of Marxist and phenomenological concepts of reason and commonsense. This is a major and accessible contribution to the debate on postmodernity.

Revealing flaws in both 'green' and market-based approaches to environmental policy, O'Neill develops an Aristotolian account of well-being. He examines the implications for wider issues involving markets, civil society an.

One of the paradoxes of recent political and economic theory is that, in spite of a period of extended economic difficulty, there has been a growing consensus concerning the virtues of the market economy. In particular, there has been a trend in socialist theory to argue that not only are socialism and the market not incompatible, but that some version of market socialism is the only feasible, practicable, and ethically and politically desirable form of socialism. Notable proponents of this view (...) with whom this paper will be particularly concerned are Selucky, Nove and Hodgson. I will not, in this paper, address the question of whether the market and socialism are necessarily incompatible. Neither will I examine the whole gamut of political and ethical issues surrounding the relation of the market to democracy, freedom, individual rights, and so on – not because they are unimportant, but because they require more extended attention than I could give here. My concern will rather be with some of the economic arguments to which defenders of market socialism have appealed. (shrink)

John O'Neill explores the human passions as both the object of psychoanalysis and the creative principle of Freud's own discovery and practice of psychoanalysis. Love, hate, anger, jealousy, envy, knowledge, and ignorance: the passions dominate infancy, adolescence, and adulthood, marking them with narcissism, murder, seduction, and self-destruction. They are both the soul's theater and the soul of theater, art, literature, and music. If fear, hate, envy, and jealousy rival love, beauty, and knowledge, or turn into one another, they just (...) as surely expand the human heart. The original essays in this volume analyze the human passions in Freud's metapsychology, from the case histories of Dora, Rat Man, and Schreber to his studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Gradiva, and the "Case of Homosexuality in a Woman." Other essays are devoted to Macbeth, the Judgment of Solomon, Virginia Woolf, and Freud's own adolescence. In constructing a genealogy of the passions from early to late modernity, these studies show the subtle interaction of psychic and social conflict, of ambivalence and disavowal in the workings of the human soul. Contributors are John O'Neill, William Kerrigan, Donald L. Carveth, Jerome Neu, Kathleen Woodward, Claire Kahane, Mary Jacobus, John Forrester, Ellie Ragland, Geoff Miles, and Laurence A. Rickels. (shrink)

The Aristotelian view that public institutions should aim at the good life is criticized on the grounds that it makes for an authoritarian politics that is incompatible with the pluralism of modem society. The criticism seems to have particular power against modem environmentalism, that it offers a local vision of the good life which fails to appreciate the variety of possible human relationships to the natural environment, andso, as a guide to public policy, it leads to green authoritarianism. This paper (...) argues to the contrary that an Aristotelian position which defends environmental goods as constitutive of the good life is consistent with recognition of the plurality of ways our relations to the natural world can be lived. It is compatible with the recognition of distinct cultural expressions of such relations and of the special place particular histories of individuals and social groups have in constraining environmental policy. (shrink)

There is a special problem with respect to our obligations to future generations which is that we can benefit or harm them but that they cannot benefit or harm us. Goodin summarizes the point well:No analysis of intergenerational justice that is cast even vaguely in terms of reciprocity can hope to succeed. The reason is the one which Addison… puts into the mouth of an Old Fellow of College, who when he was pressed by the Society to come into something (...) that might rebound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish. ‘We are always doing’ says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us’. (shrink)

Whereas smoking was once linked both to sexuality and transcendence, smoking is now correlated with medicalized death. Smoking is unhealthy because health and sex are redefined as secular rather than transcendental conduct. Freud worried about the health of civilization but did not analyse his own addiction to cigars whose smoke enveloped the practice of psychoanalysis. In the character of Zeno the paradox of the pleasure principle is reconnected to its `beyond' through the mother's complicity in the child's original theft of (...) fire. This stolen memory in turn underwrites Zeno's adult discovery of the inexhaustible pleasure of smoking each cigarette as the last cigarette, borrowing life from death. (shrink)

Introducing a new cross-disciplinary genre co-published with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, this volume argues that any attempt to break into the intertextuality of Marx's philosophy, economics, history, and sociology, or to separate him from Hegel and the classical economists, merely results in crude reductions of Marx's achievement.

ABSTRACT Is a scientific attitude to the natural world an obstacle to an appreciation of its value? This paper argues that it is not. Following Aristotle and Marx, it maintains that, properly pursued, science has value because it enables us to contemplate that which is wonderful and beautiful. However, the paper concedes that, as actually practised, science can foster a vice described by Augustine as ‘the lust of the eyes’: knowledge is sought not to open us to the world, but (...) merely to satisfy the itch of curiosity. If scientific knowledge is thus pursued, no limits to the means to it nor to its objects are recognised. Those who thus seek knowledge fail to understand its value. (shrink)

Deliberative or discursive models of democracy have recently enjoyed a revival in both political theory and policy practice. Against the picture of democracy as a procedure for aggregating and effectively meeting the given preference of individuals, deliberative theory offers a model of democracy as a forum through which judgements and preferences are formed and altered through reasoned dialogue between free and equal citizens. Much in the recent revival of deliberative democracy, especially that which comes through Habermas and Rawls, has Kantian (...) roots. Deliberative institutions are embodiments of the free public use of reason that Kant takes to define the enlightenment project. Within the Kantian model the public use of reason is incompatible with the use of rhetoric. While this paper rejects strong rhetorical criticisms of deliberative democracy which render all communication strategic, it argues that rhetorical studies of deliberation have highlighted features of deliberation which point to significant weaknesses in Kantian approaches to it. Two features are of particular importance: the role of testimony and judgements of credibility in deliberation; and the role of appeal to emotions in public discourse. Both from the Kantian perspective are potential sources of heteronomy. However, the appeal to testimony and emotion are features of public deliberation that cannot and should not be eliminated. For those committed to the enlightenment values that underlie the deliberative model of democracy the question is whether these rhetorical features of deliberation are incompatible with those values. The paper argues that they are compatible. It does so by defending an Aristotelian account of rhetoric in public deliberation which denies the Platonic contrast between reasoned discourse and rhetoric which the Kantian model inherits. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a recent paper Alan Carter argues that the claim that workers’co‐operatives merely replace exploitation by employers with ‘self‐exploitation’is nonsense: the term ‘self‐exploitation’is self‐contradictory. He maintains that the only form of exploitation to which a workers’co‐operative may be said to be subject is ‘market‐exploitation’by dominant economic actors who are external to the co‐operative. I argue that these conclusions are mistaken. While the concept of ‘market‐exploitation’is not without value, it is difficult to operationalise. While the concept of ‘self‐exploitation’is, understood literally, (...) incoherent, the claims defended by some of the users of this term can be made conceptually respectable. (shrink)

What would be a fair model for flood insurance? Catastrophic flooding has become increasingly frequent in the UK and, with climate change, is likely to become even more frequent in the future. With the UK's current flood insurance regime ending in 2013, we argues that: -/- - there is an overwhelming case for rejecting a free market in flood insurance after 2013; - this market-based approach threatens to leave many thousands of properties uninsurable, leading to extensive social blight; - there (...) are a number of possible flood insurance models that would be fairer and more sustainable. -/- We outline three approaches to 'fairness' in flood insurance, and argues that the second and third of these would be the most 'solidaristic' – i.e. those at lower risk of flooding would contribute to the support of people at higher risk: -/- 'pure actuarial fairness' – insurance costs directly reflect the level of risk faced by individuals; 'choice-sensitive fairness' – insurance costs should reflect only those risks that result from each individual's choices; 'fairness as social justice' – insurance should be provided independently of individuals' risks and choices when covering basic requirements of social justice. (shrink)

. Parsons’ Freud. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 518-532.

Is logical empiricism incompatible with a critical social science? The longstanding assumption that it is incompatible has been prominent in recent debates about welfare economics. Sen’s development of a critical and descriptively rich welfare economics is taken by writers such as Putnam, Walsh and Sen to involve the excising of the influence of logical empiricism on neo-classical economics. However, this view stands in contrast to the descriptively rich contributions to political economy of members of the left Vienna Circle, such as (...) Otto Neurath. This paper considers the compatibility of the meta-theoretical commitments of Neurath and others in the logical empiricist tradition with this first-order critical political economy. (shrink)

The development and applicability of complex numbers is often cited in defence of the formalist philosophy of mathematics. This view is rejected through an examination of hamilton's development of the notion of complex numbers as ordered pairs of reals, And his later development of the quaternion theory, Which subsequently formed the basis of vector analysis. Formalism, By protecting informal assumptions from critical scrutiny, Constrained rather than encouraged the development of mathematics.

Environmental problems have an ethical dimension. They are not just about the efficient use of resources. Justice in the distribution of environmental goods and burdens, fairness in the processes of environmental decision-making, the moral claims of future generations and non-humans, these and other ethical values inform the responses of citizens to environmental problems. How can these concerns enter into good policy-making processes?Two expert-based approaches are commonly advocated for incorporating ethical values into environmental decision-making. One is an 'economic capture' approach, according (...) to which existing economic methods can be successfully extended to include ethical concerns. For example, stated preference methods, especially contingent valuation, have been developed to try and capture ethical responses as 'non-use values' of the environment, in particular 'existence values'. The other is a 'moral expert' approach which confines economic methods to the analysis of welfare gains, and assumes committees of ethical experts will complement economic expertise.Both approaches face problems in terms of addressing many widely held ethical values about the environment. Furthermore, both face problems concerning the democratic legitimacy of their procedures. How can policy-making be made responsive to different ethical values? What role is there for new deliberative and participatory methods? How far do existing decision-making institutions have the capacities to incorporate different modes of articulating environmental values?This policy brief examines the limitations of current attempts to capture ethical values within existing economic instruments and considers how these limitations might be overcome. Section 1 examines the assumptions that standard economic theory makes about individuals when they express values and make choices about the environment. The current models of agents that inform policy-making are seen to be ill-suited to incorporating the ethical responses of agents and this reveals some of the policy failures that may result. Section 2 shows how the physical and social properties of many environmental goods prevent their being treated as commodities. Section 3 considers the problems surrounding conceptions of fairness and legitimacy in processes for environmental valuation. Section 4 raises questions concerning the capacities of policy-making institutions to take cognisance of the results of different methods for articulating environmental values. (shrink)

To hold an environmental ethic is to hold that non-human beings and states of affairs in the natural world have intrinsic value. This seemingly straightforward claim has been the focus of much recent philosophical discussion of environmental issues. Its clarity is, however, illusory. The term ‘intrinsic value’ has a variety of senses and many arguments on environmental ethics suffer from a conflation of these different senses: specimen hunters for the fallacy of equivocation will find rich pickings in the area. This (...) paper is largely the work of the underlabourer. I distinguish different senses of the concept of intrinsic value, and, relatedly, of the claim that non-human beings in the natural world have intrinsic value; I exhibit the logical relations between these claims and examine the distinct motivations for holding them. The paper is not however merely an exercise in conceptual underlabouring. It also defends one substantive thesis: that while it is the case that natural entities have intrinsic value in the strongest sense of the term, i.e., in the sense of value that exists independently of human valuations, such value does not as such entail any obligations on the part of human beings. The defender of nature’s intrinsic value still needs to show that such value contributes to the well-being of human agents. (shrink)

Holland argues that environmental deliberation should return to classical questions about the nature of the good life, understood as the worthwhile life. Holland's proposal contrasts with the revived hedonist conception of the good life which has been influential on environmentalism. The concept of the worthwhile life needs to be carefully distinguished from those of the happy life and the dutiful life. Holland's account of the worthwhile life captures the narrative dimension of human well-being which is revealed but inadequately addressed by (...) hedonic research. Environmental concerns are better understood from a non-hedonist perspective. An Aristotelian version of this perspective also offers the institutional focus which Holland suggests is required in environmental deliberation. (shrink)

No net loss approaches to environmental policy claim that policy should maintain aggregate levels of natural capital. Substitutability between natural assets allows losses in some assets to be compensated for by gains in others while maintaining overall levels of natural capital. This paper argues that significant goods that matter to people’s well-being will be lost through a policy of no net loss. The concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services that underpin the no net loss approach to environmental policy cannot (...) capture important dimensions of value that are central to human well-being. (shrink)

For the Enlightenment, science represented an ideal of rational argument, behaviour and community against which could be judged the arbitrary power and authority of other spheres of human practice. This Enlightenment ideal runs through much liberal and socialist theory. However, the Enlightenment picture of science has appeared to many to be increasingly uncompelling. What explains the apparent decline of the Enlightenment vision? This book explores one neglected answer originally proposed by Husserl, that its decline is rooted in formalism, in the (...) view that all there is to theoretical science is the construction and mastery of formal systems. O'Neill demonstrates formalist accounts of mathematics and natural science to be inadequate, and then considers and rejects Husserl's views on the origin of the formalization of the sciences. The book concludes by arguing that the rise of a formalist view of the sciences is founded in the professionalization of modern science, and discusses the significance of this professionalization for the fate of the Enlightenment view of science. Worlds Without Content: Against Formalism tackles an important set of issues which have been neglected in recent philosophy of science, and in so doing highlights themes in Husserl's later works which have been ignored by most commentators. It will be of particular interest for philosophers of mathematics, science and social theory, and for historians of mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at all. Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether such causal judgments are graded; that is, whether people treat some causes as stronger than others. To address this (...) debate, we first reanalyzed data from four recent studies. We found that causal judgments were actually multimodal: although most causal judgments made on a continuous scale were categorical, there was also some gradation. We then tested two competing explanations for this gradation: the confidence explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they have varying degrees of belief in causal relations, and the strength explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they believe that causation itself is graded. Experiment 1 tested the confidence explanation and showed that gradation in causal judgments was indeed moderated by confidence: people tended to make graded causal judgments when they were unconfident, but they tended to make more categorical causal judgments when they were confident. Experiment 2 tested the causal strength explanation and showed that although confidence still explained variation in causal judgments, it did not explain away the effects of normality, causal structure, or the number of candidate causes. Overall, we found that causal judgments were multimodal and that people make graded judgments both when they think a cause is weak and when they are uncertain about its causal role. (shrink)

Counterfactual theories propose that people’s capacity for causal judgment depends on their ability to consider alternative possibilities: The lightning strike caused the forest fire because had it not struck, the forest fire would not have ensued. To accommodate a variety of psychological effects on causal judgment, a range of recent accounts have proposed that people probabilistically sample counterfactual alternatives from which they compute a graded measure of causal strength. While such models successfully describe the influence of the statistical normality (i.e., (...) the base rate) of the candidate and alternate causes on causal judgments, we show that they make further untested predictions about how normality influences people’s confidence in their causal judgments. In a large (N = 3,020) sample of participants in a causal judgment task, we found that normality indeed influences people’s confidence in their causal judgments and that these influences were predicted by a counterfactual sampling model in which people are more confident in a causal relationship when the effect of the cause is less variable among imagined counterfactual possibilities. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Meta‐ethics and normative ethics Intrinsic value Is the rejection of meta‐ethical realism compatible with an environmental ethic? Objective value and the flourishing of living things Human sensibilities and environmental values Environmental ethics through thick and thin.

ABSTRACT It is widely supposed by both its proponents and critics that communitarianism is committed to the defence of lies of nationhood: the nation forms a surviving communal attachment in a world in which the individual is otherwise denuded of ties of community. I argue in this paper that this assumption is mistaken. It depends on a romantic image of the nation which was constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That image hides the recent historical origins of the nation (...) and its foundation in the suppression of older allegiances or their later privatisation; it continues to disguise the illusory nature of the national community. The nation is not a surviving pre‐modern community to which individuals are attached as a bulwark against the impersonality of public life in modern society. Rather the nation is one of the main vehicles for the construction of the modern unencumbered self. Communitarians need not be committed to the defence of the specifically modem forms of public irrationality and immorality that nationalism embodies. (shrink)

One influential approach to environmental problems holds that their solution requires the definition of full liberal property rights over goods that will enable their value to be registered in actual or hypothetical markets. How adequate is that solution? In this paper I offer reasons to be sceptical, by placing recent liberal arguments in the context of older debates about property, in particular those concerned with the distribution of care. Although proposals for the extension of liberal property rights over environmental goods (...) often appeal to arguments from the need to distribute care, I show that there are conflicts between them. Care for particular places that embody the life of a community that has an existence over time is often expressed through resistance to liberal property rights. We express mutual obligations to members of a community through a denial of exclusive property rights over certain common goods. Also, what constitutes care for environmental goods itself is contested across class, occupation, culture, and history. Conflicts between those with different conceptions of care are often expressed through conflicts in property rights. The justification of property rights by appeal to particular accounts of proper care has, from the time of Locke to the present, been invoked to legitimate the appropriation of goods. The introduction and maintenance of liberal property-rights regimes involves the creation and sustenance of a particular distribution of social power, and should be understood as such. (shrink)

In a recent article, ?Marxism and Radical Democracy?,1 Femia argues that Marxism is incompatible with radical democracy. In so doing he specifically reiterates2 a now common claim that the notion of scientific socialism defended by Marx and Engels and prevalent in the Second International is anti?democratic. This claim has not only been made by critics of Marxism.3 It has been a major criticism of classical Marxism within the Western Marxist tradition, in particular? in the work of the Frankfurt School.4 It (...) is one of the main reasons why the classical Marxism of Engels and the Second International has been rejected as positivist and vulgar: no modern sophisticated Marxist admits to either positivism or vulgarity. In this paper I examine and reject Femia's arguments for the claim that the notion of scientific socialism is undemocratic. I argue that the orthodox view of Marxism as a scientific theory is compatible with democracy, and indeed encourages a democratic understanding of socialism. A thoroughly vulgar Marxism is thoroughly democratic. (shrink)