One of Israel Kirzner’s less wellknown contributions is to the theory of capital. In this paper, we link the Austrian theory of capital and the theory of economic organization. Our starting point is the key Austrian notion of capital heterogeneity which we interpret in terms of attributes. Most capital assets are multi-attribute in nature, and many attributes may not be known to entrepreneurs. This fosters a need for experimenting with capital combinations. Because there are costs of measuring attributes, this process (...) has implications for economic organization. Thus, we argue that novel implications for the understanding of ownership and the existence and boundaries of firms may be teased out of such a perspective.La théorie du capital représente une des contributions les moins connues d’Israel Kirzner. Dans cet article, nous établissons le lien entre la théorie autrichienne du capital et la théorie de l’organisation économique. Notre point de départ est la notion autrichienne fondamentale d’hétérogénéité du capital que nous interprétons en termes d’attributs. De par leur nature, la plupart des biens capitaux possèdent plusieurs attributs qui peuvent demeurer inconnus aux entrepreneurs. Ceci accroît la nécessité d’expérimenter des combinaisons capitalistiques. Etant donné les coûts qu’entraîne la mesure des attributs, ce processus a des implications quant à l’organisation économique. Ainsi, cette perspective permet de tirer de nouvelles implications pour notre compréhension de la propriété, de l’existence et de la taille des firmes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern EuropePeter N. MillerCharlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xviii, 198p.Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), xviii, 449p.Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, (...) 1994), xxiv, 483p.Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1775 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), xv, 395p.Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), xiii, 217p.Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), viii, 270p.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 338p.E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii, 284p.The pre-modern political world was broken and remade in the two centuries that separate Montaigne from Jefferson. The long agony of the mixed constitution that began in the civil wars which raged in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and England and seemed settled by the widespread adoption of the maxims of reason of state, revived at the end of the period, with revolution in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Geneva, and, more famously, [End Page 725] British North America and France. The problem, classically, turned on the location of sovereignty, or supreme authority, in political systems designed to balance and diffuse rather than concentrate power. When budget deficits and fratricidal culture wars raised the cry of “necessity”—with the knowledge, of course, that necessity knew no law—estates and kings across Europe found themselves at daggers drawn. The claim that the ruler, who naturally was wholly committed to the common good, had therefore the ability to take emergency action was used both by those accustomed to rule and those newly attained to it by force. The pursuit of an “interest” that was identified with the nation’s effectively marginalized discussions of right and law while still serving an essentially constitutional, justificatory role in political debate. But if unchecked authority was necessary in order to meet the challenge of a world characterized by change and chance and thus had to reside somewhere, was there anything that made its exercise by one body more appropriate than another? This was the question that lay behind the late eighteenth-century repudiation of the reason of state “solution” to the problem of the mixed constitution. The answer, which clearly underpinned the establishment in fact of what had first been theorized already a century earlier, was that only consent could legitimate the exercise of sovereignty in time of necessity.1Representation, in one form or another, was the acknowledged solution to the problem formulated by Hobbes: “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word are understood to be angry with them they call Tyrants.” But representation also acknowledged the reality behind the charged category of “citizenship”: most people in most places could not be said to live the life of the active citizen celebrated in Roman republican literature. Hence Hobbes’s attack on recourse to classical exempla in general, and the Libertas of Lucca in particular. The idea of civis as law-abiding subject was as radical a redrawing of the terms of debate as the identification of human nature with unsociability. Insofar as politics, classically, justified itself as the means for individual self-perfection, the practice of the ancient citizen could be conceived of as the practice of that best life speculated upon by philosophers. For the represented citizen, however, politics necessarily occupied a more subsidiary position. What, then, defined the best life to which he could aspire?There is no simple answer to this question, and the early modern ambivalence has persisted into our own time... (shrink)

This bold and original work of philosophy presents an exciting new picture of concrete reality. Peter Unger provocatively breaks with what he terms the conservatism of present-day philosophy, and returns to central themes from Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell. Wiping the slate clean, Unger works, from the ground up, to formulate a new metaphysic capable of accommodating our distinctly human perspective. He proposes a world with inherently powerful particulars of two basic sorts: one mental but not physical, the (...) other physical but not mental. Whether of one sort or the other, each individual possesses powers for determining his or her own course, as well as powers for interaction with other individuals. It is only a purely mental particular--an immaterial soul, like yourself--that is ever fit for real choosing, or for conscious experiencing. Rigorously reasoning that the only satisfactory metaphysic is one that situates the physical alongside the non-physical, Unger carefully explains the genesis of, and continual interaction of, the two sides of our deeply dualistic world. Written in an accessible and entertaining style, while advancing philosophical scholarship, All the Power in the World takes readers on a philosophical journey into the nature of reality. In this riveting intellectual adventure, Unger reveals the need for an entirely novel approach to the nature of physical reality--and shows how this approach can lead to wholly unexpected possibilities, including disembodied human existence for billions of years. All the Power in the World returns philosophy to its most ambitious roots in its fearless attempt to answer profoundly difficult human questions about ourselves and our world. (shrink)

In these challenging pages, Unger argues for the extreme skeptical view that, not only can nothing ever be known, but no one can ever have any reason at all for anything. A consequence of this is that we cannot ever have any emotions about anything: no one can ever be happy or sad about anything. Finally, in this reduction to absurdity of virtually all our supposed thought, he argues that no one can ever believe, or even say, that anything is (...) the case. (shrink)

For some fifty years now, nearly all work in mainstream analytic philosophy has made no serious attempt to understand the _nature of_ _physical reality,_ even though most analytic philosophers take this to be all of reality, or nearly all. While we've worried much about the nature of our own experiences and thoughts and languages, we've worried little about the nature of the vast physical world that, as we ourselves believe, has them all as only a small part.

This essay attempts to implement epistemic logic through a non-classical inference relation. Given that relation, an account of '(the individual) a knows that A' is constructed as an unfamiliar non-normal modal logic. One advantage to this approach is a new analysis of the skeptical argument.

Wahrnehmung / Philosophie / Wissenschaft / Geschichte.

In everyday life people frequently recognize that a person at a time may be more or less strongly motivated to carry out an intentional action and that “trying harder” frequently affects the successful completion of an intentional action. In “Rational Choice and Action Omnipotence,” John Pollock provides an original account of rational choice in which “trying to do an action” is a basic factor. This paper argues that Pollock’s “expected-utility optimality prescription” is deficient because it lacks a parameter for intensity (...) of trying. The paper also indicates specific ways in which this deficiency could be corrected. (shrink)

Courts and commentators have struggled for years to identify rules to explain and justify certain widely-shared intuitions about impossibility attempts, and they have proposed rules variously based upon (1) what mistakes actors make, (2) what intentions actors possess, and (3) what conduct actors perform. None of the proposals fully succeeds, however, and none is able to explain the widely-shared intuition, which underlies Sandy Kadish's inventive hypothetical regarding Mr. Law and Mr. Fact, that some attempts based upon mistakes of law are (...) just as blameworthy as attempts based upon mistakes of fact. I propose an alternative rule that, I believe, not only explains where and why people possess widely-shared intuitions regarding impossibility attempts (including regarding Mr. Law and Mr. Fact), but also explains where and why people have conflicting intuitions. I argue that widely-shared intuitions of blameworthiness and non-blameworthiness regarding impossibility attempts are a function, respectively, of whether informed citizens of the jurisdiction that enacted the statutory offense that the defendant allegedly attempted to commit widely believe or disbelieve that he would have been a threat to interests that the statute seeks to protect - a determination, in turn, that is a function of whether they widely believe or disbelieve that he would have committed the offense under counterfactual circumstances that they fear could have obtained. (shrink)

Few people, if any, still argue that science in all its aspects is a value-free endeavor. At the very least, values affect decisions about the choice of research problems to investigate and the uses to which the results of research are applied. But what about the actual doing of science? -/- As Science, Values, and Objectivity reveals, the connections and interactions between values and science are quite complex. The essays in this volume identify the crucial values that play a role (...) in science, distinguish some of the criteria that can be used for value identification, and elaborate the conditions for warranting certain values as necessary or central to the very activity of scientific research. -/- Recently, social constructivists have taken the presence of values within the scientific model to question the basis of objectivity. However, the contributors to <I>Science, Values, and Objectivity</I> recognize that such acknowledgment of the role of values does not negate the fact that objects exist in the world. Objects have the power to constrain our actions and thoughts, though the norms for these thoughts lie in the public, social world. -/- Values may be decried or defended, praised or blamed, but in a world that strives for a modicum of reason, values, too, must be reasoned. Critical assessment of the values that play a role in scientific research is as much a part of doing good science as interpreting data. (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

This volume presentsa definitive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of science.

By contributing a few hundred dollars to a charity like UNICEF, a prosperous person can ensure that fewer poor children die, and that more will live reasonably long, worthwhile lives. Even when knowing this, however, most people send nothing, and almost all of the rest send little. What is the moral status of this behavior? To such common cases of letting die, our untutored response is that, while it is not very good, neither is the conduct wrong. What is the (...) source of this lenient assessment? In this contentious new book, one of our leading philosophers argues that our intuitions about ethical cases are generated not by basic moral values, but by certain distracting psychological dispositions that all too often prevent us from reacting in accord with our commitments. Through a detailed look at how these tendencies operate, Unger shows that, on the good morality that we already accept, the fatally unhelpful behavior is monstrously wrong. By uncovering the eminently sensible ethics that we've already embraced fully, and by confronting us with empirical facts and with easily followed instructions for lessening serious suffering appropriately and effectively, Unger's book points the way to a compassionate new moral philosophy. (shrink)

The topic of personal identity has prompted some of the liveliest and most interesting debates in recent philosophy. In a fascinating new contribution to the discussion, Peter Unger presents a psychologically aimed, but physically based, account of our identity over time. While supporting the account, he explains why many influential contemporary philosophers have underrated the importance of physical continuity to our survival, casting a new light on the work of Lewis, Nagel, Nozick, Parfit, Perry, Shoemaker, and others. Deriving from (...) his discussion of our identity itself, Unger produces a novel but commonsensical theory of the relations between identity and some of our deepest concerns. In a conservative but flexible spirit, he explores the implications of his theory for questions of value and of the good life. (shrink)

The idea that sociology has the status of a strict science—that is, that sociology, like mathematics, has at its disposal a well-founded, deductive system of propositions—is nowadays rejected even more by its pragmatic advocates than by its skeptical practitioners; it is refuted both by the arbitrary manipulation of sociology’s internally constitutive, theoretical interconnections at the hands of practical interests and technocratic utility, and by the resultant increasing relativization of its findings. However, as we shall see, the arbitrariness of the treatment (...) of sociology does not correspond with any arbitrariness in its object. On the contrary, with all empirical relativity a structural constancy persists in the agency constructing, comparing, and evaluating the experience of the everyday world, as well as scientific experience. This was precisely Kant’s discovery, that the conditions making possible our primary experience of objects must be, at the same time, the constitutive structure of the objects themselves, and also the framework for the scientifically systematic treatment of them, because otherwise there could be no knowledge in the sense of the structural identification of object, experience, and reflection. This Kantian principle guarantees, then, that sociology is indeed possible as a strict science; that is, it is completely possible as an integral, deductive aspect of theory, as long as we reconstruct, by means of axioms and postulates, the constitution of the object of theory out of the structure of our direct interpersonal experience. In this vein, Rene König, a pioneer in modern German social science, states. (shrink)

This paper outlines an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark in the _Big Typescript_ in which he compares the philosopher bewitched by the workings of language to “the suffering of an ascetic”. The interpretation takes as its starting point Friedrich Nietzsche’s terse account of the philosopher, the history of philosophy, and his diagnosis of ascetic self-misunderstanding, from the Third Essay, “What do ascetic ideals mean?”, in _On the Genealogy of Morality_. In its assumption of an affinity between Wittgenstein’s remark and Nietzsche’s (...) descriptions, and in its analysis, this paper introduces a “method of voice borrowing” to approach the question: “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche?” The juxtaposition of Wittgenstein’s conception of the philosopher’s linguistic self-misunderstanding with Nietzsche’s notion of the ascetic self-misunderstanding leads finally to the question of what is gained by introducing this method, and hence by reading Wittgenstein’s remark on the suffering of an ascetic with the help of Nietzsche’s voice. (shrink)

Previous work proposes that dispositional fear exists predominantly among political conservatives, generating the appearance that fears align strictly along party lines. This view obscures evolutionary dynamics because fear evolved to protect against myriad threats, not merely those in the political realm. We suggest prior work in this area has been biased by selection on the dependent variable, resulting from an examination of exclusively politically oriented fears that privilege conservative values. Because the adaptation regulating fear should be based upon both universal (...) and ancestral-specific selection pressures combined with developmental and individual differences, the elicitation of it should prove variable across the ideological continuum dependent upon specific combinations of fear and value domains. In a sample of ~ 1,600 Australians assessed with a subset of the Fear Survey Schedule II, we find fears not infused with political content are differentially influential across the political spectrum. Specifically, those who are more fearful of sharp objects, graveyards, and urinating in public are more socially conservative and less supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of death are more supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of suffocating and swimming alone are more concerned about emissions controls and immigration, while those who are more fearful of thunderstorms are also more anti-immigration. Contrary to existing research, both liberals and conservatives are more fearful of different circumstances, and the role of dispositional fears are attitude-specific. (shrink)

The act of interpretation occurs in nearly every area of the arts and sciences. That ubiquity serves as the inspiration for the fourteen essays of this volume, covering many of the domains in which interpretive practices are found. Individual topics include: the general nature of interpretation and its forms; comparing and contrasting interpretation and hermeneutics; culture as interpretation seen through Hegel’s aesthetics; interpreting philosophical texts; methodologies for interpreting human action; interpretation in medical practice focusing on manifestations as indicators of disease; (...) the brain and its interpretative, structured, learning and storage processes; interpreting hybrid wines and cognitive preconceptions of novel objects; and the importance of sensory perception as means of interpreting in the case of dry German Rieslings. In an interesting turn, Nicholas Rescher writes on the interpretation of philosophical texts. Then Catherine Wilson and Andreas Blank explicate and critique Rescher’s theories through analysis of the mill passage from Leibniz’s _Monadology._. (shrink)

This book is the only contemporary, systematic study of the relationship of time and conscious experience. Peter K. Mclnerney examines three tightly interconnected issues: how we are able to be conscious of time and temporal entities, whether time exists independently of conscious experience, and whether the conscious experiencer exists in time in the same way that ordinary natural objects are thought to exist in time. Insight is drawn from the views of major phenomenological and existential thinkers on these issues. (...) Building on a detailed explication and critique of the views of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Mclnerney develops and defends his own positions. He argues that a revised version of Husserl’s three-feature theory of time-consciousness provides the best explanation of our awareness of temporal features, but that an independently real time is necessary to explain our experience of temporal passage. He also shows that human existence has some special temporal features in addition to those it shares with other entities. Time-consciousness, the conscious exercise of powers, and personal identity through time require that any temporal part of human existence be defined by and "reach across" to earlier and later parts. (shrink)

In this study, we replicated what is known about the relative importance of dealbreakers and dealmakers in romantic and sexual relationships and extended it to an examination of self-reports of mate value, self-esteem, and loneliness. In two experiments we manipulated the information people were told about potential partners and asked them about their intentions to have sex again with or go on a second date with opposite sex targets. People were less interested in partners after learning dealbreakers, effects which operated (...) more strongly in the long-term than short-term context, but similarly in men and women. People who reported less self-esteem or more loneliness were more receptive to people with dealbreakers. People who thought they had more mate value, more self-esteem, or less loneliness were more receptive to dealmakers. Results are discussed using sociometer, prospect, and sexual strategies theories. (shrink)