Introduction -- The starting point : Aristotle's classification of justice -- High scholastics -- Late scholastics -- A special theological problem : divine justice -- Jewish commentators -- Post scholastic writers -- The modern use of Aristotle's forms of justice.

Introduction George Loewenstein, Daniel Read, and Roy F. Baumeister P _L sychology and economics have a classic love-hate relationship. ...

This book examines the relevance of François Laruelle’s innovative notion of non-standard philosophy to critical and constructive discourses in the humanities, bringing together essays from prominent Anglophone scholars of Laruelle’s work and includes a contribution from Laurelle himself.

1000 time-travelers travel back in time, each with the intention of killing their own infant-self. If there is no branching time, then on pain of bringing about a logical contradiction, all must fail. But this seems inexplicable: what is to ensure that the time-travelers are stopped? For a time, this inexplicability objection was thought to provide evidence that there is something incoherent about the possibility of backwards time travel in a universe without branching time. There is now near-consensus, however, that (...) the objection has no bite: there is nothing inexplicable about the mass failure. Lewis, Sider and Ismael independently argue that since it is built into the description of the class of cases considered that the time-travelers must fail – and so we consider only unsuccessful attempts – there is no mystery. Smith argues that the absence of possible worlds at which auto-infanticide is committed suffices as a complete explanation for the failures. And Baron and Colyvan maintain that available causal and logical explanations jointly account for everything that needs accounting for. I argue that these are wrong. There is remaining, problematic inexplicability. For backwards time travel not to lead to logical contradiction, something would need to do logic’s bidding, after all. (shrink)

According to Dummett's interpretation, one finds Wittgenstein denying the existence of a general linguistic action of “communicating something” at many places in the Investigations. In Wittgenstein's view, however, the author errs when (in philosophical contexts) he ignores the projective step and concludes from the meaningful applicability of the expression that he is speaking here of an “inner object of feeling” that should arouse the epistemological interest. The author proposes the middle passage of § 363, which is so important for Dummett's (...) interpretation: Wittgenstein certainly does not want to deny that linguistic actions do include speech acts of communicating something or informing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The apparent consistency of Sobel sequences famously motivated David Lewis to defend a variably strict conditional semantics for counterfactuals. If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro. If Sophie had gone to the parade and had been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro. But if the order of the counterfactuals in a Sobel sequence is reversed—in the example, if is asserted prior to —the second counterfactual asserted no longer rings true. This (...) is the Heim sequence problem. That the order of assertion makes this difference is surprising on the variably strict account. Some argue that this is reason to reject the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics outright. Others argue that the problem motivates a contextualist rendering of counterfactuals. Still others maintain that the explanation for the phenomenon is merely pragmatic. I argue that none of these is right, and I defend a novel way to understand the phenomenon. My proposal avoids the problems faced by the alternative analyses and enjoys independent support. There is, however, a difficulty for my view: it entails that many ordinarily accepted counterfactuals are not true. I argue that this cost is acceptable. (shrink)

The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres.

George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within both disciplines. This book brings together a selection of his papers focusing on what he calls "exotic preferences"-- the disparate motives that drive human behavior. Anoriginal introduction (...) outlines Loewenstein's general approach to research, and there are short introductions to each paper outlining briefly when, how and why they came to be written, providing a fascinating and vivid insight into the process of intellectual creativity. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's influential Direct Argument (DA) for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and causal determinism makes use of an inference rule he calls "Rule B." Michael McKenna has argued that van Inwagen's defense of this rule is dialectically inappropriate because it is based entirely on alleged “confirming” cases that are not of the right kind to justify the use of Rule B in DA. Here I argue that McKenna’s objection is on the right track but more must be said (...) if we are to see why. To fill in the gaps I consider a recent attempt by Ira M. Schnall and David Widerker to defend DA against McKenna’s objection. I argue that neither prong of their attack is successful against a variation on McKenna’s basic argument. In the course of responding to Schnall and Widerker’s objections to McKenna, I identify what is, as I argue, the real reason DA fails in its purpose to shift the burden of proof. (shrink)

Using research into learning from sequences of examples, we generate predictions about what cultural products become widely distributed in the social marketplace of ideas. We investigate what we term the Repetition‐Break plot structure: the use of repetition among obviously similar items to establish a pattern, and then a final contrasting item that breaks with the pattern to generate surprise. Two corpus studies show that this structure arises in about a third of folktales and story jokes. An experiment shows that jokes (...) with this structure are more interesting than those without the initial repetition. Thus, we document evidence for how a cognitive factor influences the cultural products that are selected in the marketplace of ideas. (shrink)

Just as knowledge contextualism offers a way out of knowledge skepticism in the face of powerful skeptical arguments, counterfactual contextualism purports to answer the many compelling arguments for the skeptical thesis that most ordinary counterfactuals of the form ‘if A had happened, C would have happened’, are false. In this article I review a few of the arguments for counterfactual skepticism, before surveying the various types of contextualist responses. I then discuss some of the recent objections to counterfactual contextualism, with (...) an eye toward weighing contextualism's costs with the costs of accepting skepticism. I conclude by remarking on some of the implications that skepticism and contextualism each has for many disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

We explore the connection between four major inferential paradigms in statistical science and inferential practice in current econometrics. We develop the argument that econometrics is still largely characterized by John Stuart Mill’s conception of statistical inference from data, who saw a distinction between ‘theorists’ and ‘practical men’. We follow up with a review of all empirical papers published in the Top 5 economics journals in the period 2000–2018 (N = 2,258). In spite of Rodrik’s [(2015). Economics rules: The rights and (...) wrongs of the dismal science. W. W. Norton & Company] much-debated notion of economics that sees issues of model selection at the core of the discipline, the ‘theory first’ / ‘pre-eminence of theory’ approach vastly dominates in the sample (94.0%). When model selection and model uncertainty is accounted for, this largely happens under the frequentist statistical paradigm. This finding may be explained by frequentism’s special role as an ‘orientational paradigm’ (Hoyningen-Huene and Kincaid, [2023]. What makes economics special: Orientational paradigms. Journal of Economic Methodology, 30(2), 188–202) in economics. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes how Wittgenstein explicitly addresses the possibility of distinguishing between word types, and not only in the form of presentation of examples. Wittgenstein might be using the terms “kind of word” and “part of speech” in a quite unusual way. The author focuses on just one language, thus no longer being concerned with the possibility of developing diverse new languages without limit. It is not surprising that in the natural languages very many more word types than did “the (...) logicians,” above all Frege, Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, particularly if one does not limit one's interest in language to the expression of a “judgeable content.”. Wittgenstein hints that the classification of words or sentences by their ways of usage on one hand and by their belonging to different types on the other, is a result of two different standpoints on the classification of elements of language. (shrink)

This chapter looks for a new understanding of the picture of a “projection”; and indeed the example of river names suggests a new way of speaking of projections. The considerations Wittgenstein discusses here indicate that the imagination (projection) is intertwined with calculation and that this should be considered a characteristic feature of natural languages: agreement about the success of the ongoing shared activities demands at every step the ability to project, to transfer – it demands creative imagination. Theoretically, an insight (...) into the workings of our language is all too often denied us because it is blocked by traditional pictures and prejudices. That is why philosophy plays such a decisive, critical role in its apparently quite conservative “mere description”: because it must point out how to distinguish those cases in which language “works properly” from those in which it leads us astray by “going on holiday”. (shrink)

Wittgenstein distinguishes two areas of what he calls the “use” of a word. First, there is the application of a word in the construction of a sentence, which he calls the “surface grammar.” Second, there is a usage that goes beyond the merely verbal part of language games, the rules governing which he terms “depth grammar.” These latter rules constitute what the preliminary work for the Investigations still referred to as “logical form.” To spell out Wittgenstein's analogy a little, he (...) must mean that, just as we are accustomed to saying the alphabet aloud in a certain way, so too are we familiar with the forms of expression of our language, for example with the subject predicate form. One became familiar with the forms in the course of originally learning how to use them ‐ that is, in learning certain ways of forming linguistic complexes at the level of content. (shrink)

Taking up some of W.’s paradoxical remarks about the existence of ‘mental things’ the paper investigates, what exactly he is criticizing. After a discussion of the mistaken idea of a private baptizing of one’s own ‘mental events’ W.’s general criticism of the ‘object-and-name model’ is treated with a view on the consequences it has for our understanding of the mental. This treatment includes a discussion of figurative kinds of language use as well as a discussion of the difference between ‘things’ (...) and ‘objects of reference’: With respect to figurative uses of language it often makes no sense to treat constituent expressions as names of objects, and not all objects of reference are things in an unproblematic ordinary-life sense. So what at first sight appears to be a limitation of our understanding of the nature of an object and consequently seems to ask for more empirical research often turns out to be a limitation of our understanding of how we use our language. The paper concludes that one important aspect of what the later W. opposes is dualism: The mental cannot be conceived of as an additional ‘something’ a description of which could be just added to a description of a person as a physical being. Thus W.’s anti-dualism can also be read as turning against a dualism in his Tractatus: The mental realm as well as other provinces of ‘the higher’ are no longer seen as areas of entities about which we have to be silent. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz reagiert auf Peter Bieris Kritik der analytischen Philosophie und plädiert dafür, die systematischen sprachphilosophischen Einsichten des späten Wittgenstein als dauerhaft und weiterführend anzusehen, was insbesondere für unser Verständnis des Mentalen weitere Fortschritte verspricht. Er wendet sich gegen rein ,therapeutische Lesarten' von Wittgenstein und gegen die Streichung des erkenntnistheoretischen Impulses aus der Sprachphilosophie.