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  Social Contractarianism

  John Thrasher

  "It is a curious accident of history that libertarianism has been principally defined by its greatest enemies, rather than its friends. In academic philosophy at least, this was accomplished by G.A. Cohen in his attacks on Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which culminated in his Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995). Cohen identified the central elements of libertarianism as the self-ownership thesis, which is crucial for justifying strong private property rights and, subsequently, substantial limitations on state power to interfere with those rights. This definition was continued by the so-called “left-libertarians” who followed him (Steiner 1994; Vallentyne & Steiner 2000; Vallentyne et al. 2005; Otsuka 2005).1 These thinkers combine a commitment to self-ownership and rights with a Marxist and egalitarian views about property. On this view, libertarianism is held to be fundamentally a doctrine about property rights and selfownership. This is, I will argue, a serious mistake that has hobbled libertarianism theory and practice in important ways, specifically by entrenching two dominant antinomies in libertarian theory."

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  Libertarianism

  Bas van der Vossen

  Libertarianism is a theory in political philosophy that strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government in our lives. Libertarians see individuals as sovereign, as people who have a right to control their bodies and work, who are free to decide how to interact with willing others, and who cannot be forced to do things against their will without very strong justification.

  For some, the argument in support of this view hinges on the principle of self-ownership. To them, individual rights are morally foundational, the basic building blocks of their theory. Many others, however, take a broader view, arguing that societies flourish when they offer people large degrees of freedom in both personal and economic matters.

  As a result, libertarianism sees the state as playing at most only a very limited role in matters concerning distributive justice. Libertarians are skeptical about calls to reduce material inequality for its own sake, strongly favor free trade, and defend opening borders for migrants. They see policies that violate these commitments as inevitably involving wrongs against free and equal persons.

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  Abstraction and Epistemic Economy

  Marco Panza

  Most of the arguments usually appealed to in order to support the view that some abstraction principles are analytic depend on ascribing to them some sort of existential parsimony or ontological neutrality, whereas the opposite arguments, aiming to deny this view, contend this ascription. As a result, other virtues that these principles might have are often overlooked. Among them, there is an epistemic virtue which I take these principles to have, when regarded in the appropriate settings, and which I suggest to call ‘epistemic economy’. My purpose is to isolate and clarify this notion by appealing to some examples concerning the definition of natural and real numbers.

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  Self-Determination and Moral Variation

  Bas van der Vossen

  "Self-determination plays a central role in debates about international morality and law. One important argument invokes the value of self-determination in order to show that rules of international morality and law should be modest or limited in content. The basic idea is clear enough. Self-determination seems to involve a kind of social process by which different groups, including political states, can develop their own distinctive shared moral codes. And so there can be legitimate moral variation between political societies. Because self-determination is valuable, the argument goes, acceptable international norms should allow for this variation, at least within certain limits. Self-determination thus constrains the demands of global justice and, consequently, international law."

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  Rational Choice and the Original Position: The (Many) Models of Rawls and Harsanyi

  Gerald Gaus and John Thrasher

  "Rawls proclaims that 'the theory of justice is part, perhaps the nwst significant part, of the theory of rational choice' (T]R, p. 15, emphasis added; see section 2.2.3 below). Many have refused to take this claim literally (or even seriously), by, for example, interpreting the original position analysis as a heuristic for identifying independently true moral principles (see Dworkin, "Original Position," p. 19 and Barry, Theories, pp. 271-82). In this chapter we take this fundamental claim of Rawls at face value. We thus shall defend:

  The Fundamental Derivation Thesis: the justification of a principle of justice J derives from the conclusion that, under conditions C, J is the rational choice of chooser(s) P."

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  Newton on Indivisibles

  Antoni Malet and Marco Panza

  Though Wallis’s Arithmetica infinitorum was one of Newton’s major sources of inspiration during the first years of his mathematical education, indivisibles were not a central feature of his mathematical production.

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  Wallis on Indivisibles

  Antoni Malet and Marco Panza

  The present chapter is devoted, first, to discuss in detail the structure and results of Wallis’s major and most influential mathematical work, the Arithmetica Infinitorum (Wallis 1656). Next we will revise Wallis’s views on indivisibles as articulated in his answer to Hobbes’s criticism in the early 1670s. Finally, we will turn to his discussion of the proper way to understand the angle of contingence in the first half of the 1680s. As we shall see, there are marked differences in the status that indivisibles seem to enjoy in Wallis’s thought along his mathematical career. These differences correlate with the changing context of seventeenth century mathematics from the 1650s through the 1680s, but also respond to the different uses Wallis gave to indivisibles in different kinds of texts—purely mathematical, openly polemical, or devoted to philosophical discussion of foundational matters.

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  «“Una stessa cosa”». Come intendere la definizione della continuità di Aristiotele

  Marco Panza

  I focus on the definition of continuity Aristotle advances in Physics V.3 and contrast two different possible interpretations if it, by suggesting that one if them is more appropriate.

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  Introduction to Functions and Generality of Logic. Reflections on Frege's and Dedekind's Logicisms

  Hourya Benis Sinaceur, Marco Panza, and Gabriel Sandu

  This book examines three connected aspects of Frege’s logicism: the differences between Dedekind’s and Frege’s interpretation of the term ‘logic’ and related terms and reflects on Frege’s notion of function, comparing its understanding and the role it played in Frege’s and Lagrange’s foundational programs. It concludes with an examination of the notion of arbitrary function, taking into account Frege’s, Ramsey’s and Russell’s view on the subject. Composed of three chapters, this book sheds light on important aspects of Dedekind’s and Frege’s logicisms. The first chapter explains how, although he shares Frege’s aim at substituting logical standards of rigor to intuitive imports from spatio-temporal experience into the deductive presentation of arithmetic, Dedekind had a different goal and used or invented different tools. The chapter highlights basic dissimilarities between Dedekind’s and Frege’s actual ways of doing and thinking. The second chapter reflects on Frege’s notion of a function, in comparison with the notions endorsed by Lagrange and the followers of the program of arithmetization of analysis. It remarks that the foundational programs pursued by Lagrange and Frege are crucially different and based on a different idea of what the foundations of mathematics should be like. However, despite this contrast, the notion of function plays similar roles in the two programs, and this chapter emphasizes the similarities. The third chapter traces the development of thinking about Frege’s program in the foundations of mathematics, and includes comparisons of Frege’s, Russell’s and Ramsey’s views. The chapter discusses earlier papers written by Hintikka, Sandu, Demopoulos and Trueman. Although the chapter’s main focus is on the notion of arbitrary correlation, it starts out by discussing some aspects of the connection between this notion and Dedekind Theorem.

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  The Calculus of Consent

  John Thrasher and Gerald Gaus

  The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is a groundbreaking work in democratic theory. This chapter argues that it is of continued relevance today, due both to its methodological innovations and its use of those innovative techniques to solve the fundamental problem of democratic justification. In Calculus, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock fuse economic methods, political theory, and the normative project of showing how democratic institutions of a particular sort can be justified contractually, creating a unique form of democratic contractualism that came to be known as “Constitutional Political Economy” and the more general research program of “Public Choice Theory.” Although these pioneering techniques have been integrated into mainstream political theory, the interest of their normative project has not been similarly appreciated.

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  On the Indispensable Premises of the Indispensability Argument

  Andrea Sereni and Marco Panza

  We identify four different minimal versions of the indispensability argument, falling under four different varieties: an epistemic argument for semantic realism, an epistemic argument for platonism and a non-epistemic version of both. We argue that most current formulations of the argument can be reconstructed by building upon the suggested minimal versions. Part of our discussion relies on a clarification of the notion of (in)dispensability as relational in character. We then present some substantive consequences of our inquiry for the philosophical significance of the indispensability argument, the most relevant of which being that both naturalism and confirmational holism can be dispensed with, contrary to what is held by many.

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  The Virtues of Justice

  John Thrasher and David Schmidtz

  "This essay considers (and endorses) three complementary conceptions of justice as virtue. To the two senses of justice just mentioned-justice as a virtue of the soul and of the polis-we add a third that bridges these two. Virtue can be a kind of outreach rather than a kind of internal harmony, because we are talking about essentially social beings. The harmony that is this virtue's object is harmony with a community. Thus, a person who is just in this sense is disposed to respect (play within the rules of) institutions that command respect by virtue of actually working-that is, actually succeeding in encouraging and enabling people to live in harmony, to peacefully flourish in mutually advantageous ways. A just person in this sense is disposed to respect just institutions even when such respect is not personally advantageous, indeed (as Hume saw) when such respect is not even good for the community in the particular case."

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  Of Mottos and Morals

  Mike W. Martin

  Whether in slogans, catchphrases, adages or proverbs, we encounter mottos every day, but we rarely take time to reflect on them. In Of Mottos and Morals: Simple Words for Complex Virtues, Martin explores the possibility that mottos themselves are worthy of serious thought, examining how they contribute to moral guidance and help us grapple with complexity.

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  Paradoxes of Happiness

  Mike W. Martin

  Should happiness be pursued directly and deliberately, keeping our eyes on the prize? Doing so is self-defeating, according to the paradox of happiness, for it undermines meaning and even enjoyment. Instead we should participate in activities and relationships that we find inherently meaningful, rather than solely because of the happiness we hope to find in them. Then, with any luck, happiness will come indirectly. I believe this paradox expresses an important truth, albeit by using a dollop of hyperbole. Indeed, it expresses a number of truths that are highlighted by dividing the paradox of happiness into a dozen more specific paradoxes concerning aims (hedonism, self-interest), success, freedom, and attitudes.

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  Social Evolution

  Gerald Gaus and John Thrasher

  "It is a mater of dispute how far back evolutionary explanations of social order should be traced. Evolutionary ideas certainly appear in the work of the ancient Greek philosophers, but it seems reasonable to identify the origins of modern evolutionary thinking in the eighteenth century natural histories of civil society such as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1750, Part III), Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776, Book III). In these eighteenth century works, the explanation of current social institutions as an unplanned and generally adaptive development out of earlier and simpler arrangements gained traction. Germany too had a tradition of Naturphilosophie employing general evolutionary ideas, as well as Hegelian-influenced thinking on the development of societies. In 1863, four years after Darwin’s Origins of the Species August Schleicher’s Die Darwinscbe Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaf, drew on these traditions as well as Darwin’s Origins of the Species to present an evolutionary account of the development of families of languages (Taub, 1993), an endeavor that was carried on by a number of scholars in the later part of the nineteenth century."

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  Balancing Work And Leisure

  Mike W. Martin

  What does it mean to live a balanced life, and in particular to maintain balance between work and leisure? Balance is often celebrated for its contribution to happiness. Yet happiness is also one of the main criteria for telling when lives are balanced. Other criteria include health and moral responsibility. As elsewhere, these criteria are multifaceted and sometimes conflicting in good lives.

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  From Velocities to Fluxions

  Marco Panza

  "Though the De Methodis results, for its essential structure and content, from a re-elaboration of a previous unfinished treatise composed in the Fall of 1666—now known, after Whiteside, as The October 1666 tract on fluxions ([22], I, pp. 400-448)—, the introduction of the term ‘fluxion’ goes together with an important conceptual change concerned with Newton’s understanding of his own achievements. I shall argue that this change marks a crucial step in the origins of analysis, conceived as an autonomous mathematical theory."

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  What More There Is in Early-Modern Algebra than its Literal Formalism

  Marco Panza

  "There are two views about early-modern algebra very often endorsed (either explicitly or implicitly). The former is that in early-modern age, algebra and geometry were different branches of mathematics and provided alternative solutions for many problems. The latter is that early-modern algebra essentially resulted from the adoption of a new literal formalism. My present purpose is to question the latter. In doing that, I shall also implicitly undermine the former."

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  Isaac Barrow and the Bounds of Geometry

  Marco Panza

  I discuss two examples advanced by Barrow in his Lectiones Mathematicæ in order to argue for the (foundational) primacy of geometry over arithmetic.

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  Creativity: Ethics and Excellence in Science

  Mike W. Martin

  Creativity explores the moral dimensions of creativity in science in a systematic and comprehensive way. A work of applied philosophy, professional ethics, and philosophy of science, the book argues that scientific creativity often constitutes moral creativity the production of new and morally variable outcomes. At the same time, creative ambitions have a dark side that can lead to professional misconduct and harmful effects on society and the environment.

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  Nombres. Eléments de mathématiques pour philosophes

  Marco Panza

  Livre tiré des notes de cours de mathématiques pour philosophes (première année de Deug) tenus à Nantes entre 1993 et 2001

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  Adultery

  Mike W. Martin

  Sexuality has captured the imagination of thinkers since antiquity. It has inspired numerous creative works and posed myriad ethical, legal, and social challenges. Unlike other references, which discuss the biology of sex, this encyclopedia explores sexuality as the subject of philosophy. Through more than 150 alphabetically arranged entries on thinkers, topics, movements, religions, and concepts, the encyclopedia locates sexuality in its humanistic and social contexts.

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  From Morality to Mental Health: Virtue and Vice in a Therapeutic Culture

  Mike W. Martin

  In this wide-ranging, accessible book, Martin asks: are we replacing morality with therapy, in potentially confusing and dangerous ways, or are we creatively integrating morality and mental health? Martin touches on practical concerns like love, work, self-respect, self-fulfillment, guilt, depression, crime, violence, and addictions. He uses examples from popular culture as well as drawing on a line of thought that includes Plato, the Stoics, Freud, Nietzsche, and contemporary psychotherapeutic theories. In the end, Martin convincingly shows how both morality and mental health are inextricably intertwined in our pursuit of a meaningful life

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  Some Sober Conceptions of Mathematical Truth

  Marco Panza

  It is not sufficient to supply an instance of Tarski’s schema, ⌈“p” is true if and only if p⌉ for a certain statement in order to get a definition of truth for this statement and thus fix a truth-condition for it. A definition of the truth of a statement x of a language L is a bi-conditional whose two members are two statements of a meta-language L’. Tarski’s schema simply suggests that a definition of truth for a certain segment x of a language L consists in a statement of the form: ⌈v(x) is true if and only if τ(x)⌉, where ⌈v(x)⌉ is the name of x in L’ and τ(x) is a function τ: S → S’ (S and S’ being the sets of the statements respectively of L end L’) which associates to x the statement of L’ expressed by the same sentence as that which expresses x in L. In order to get a definition of truth for x and thus fix a truth-condition for it, one has thus to specify the function τ. A conception of truth for a certain class X of mathematical statements is a general condition imposed on the truth-conditions for the statements of this class. It is advanced when the nature of the function τ is specified for the statements belonging to X. It is sober when there is no need to appeal to a controversial ontology in order to describe the conditions under which the statement τ(x) is assertible. Four sober conceptions of truth are presented and discussed.

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  The Origins of Analytical Mechanics in 18th Century

  Marco Panza

  An overview of the history of analytical mechanics in 18th century.