Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, but (...) not to their compulsive desires. This view allows identificationist theorists of moral responsibility to explain why weak-willed actions, but not compulsive actions, are attributable to agents such that they can, in theory, be praised or blamed for them. After motivating and presenting the view in detail, I show how it has unique resources for explaining the ethics of managing one's compulsions. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that choosing to live forever comes with the threat of an especially pernicious kind of boredom. However, it may be theoretically possible to circumvent it by finding ways to pursue an infinite number of projects consistent with one’s personality, taking on endlessly pursuable endlessly interesting projects, or by rekindling old projects once you’ve forgotten about them. However, each of these possibilities is contingent upon having certain traits that you are likely not currently in a good (...) position to assess. I therefore argue that no one is in a good position to be confident about her prospects for living forever. (shrink)

This paper advances a new agentially undemanding account of the conditions of attributability, the Minimal Approval account, and argues that it has a number of advantages over traditional Deep Self theories, including the way in which it handles agents with conditions like addiction, Tourette syndrome, and misophonia. It is argued that in order for an agent to be attributionally responsible, the mental process that leads to her action must dispose her to be such that she would, upon reflec-tion, approve to (...) some minimal degree of being moved to action by the motive on which she in fact acts. (shrink)

Much of the literature on impairment to self-governance focuses on cases in which a person either lacks the ability to protect herself from errant urges or cases in which a person lacks the capacity to initiate self-reflective agential processes. This has led to frameworks for thinking about self-governance designed with only the possibility of these sorts of impairments in mind. I challenge this orthodoxy using the case of melancholic depression to show that there is a third way that self-governance can (...) be undermined: an agent may fail to form the desire she most wants to act on. (shrink)

In Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead, Frances Kamm seeks to make sense of people’s widely variant choices about which lives they would choose to continue living. She does this by defending the Prudential Prerogative, which, in analogy to the Moral Prerogative, holds that in a fairly wide range of conditions we are under no intrapersonal rational obligation to choose either to die or to live on. I argue against Kamm's case for the Prudential Prerogative in favor of Life Holism, the (...) view that you ought to live the life that would be best for you as an individual when each potential life is considered as a whole. I argue that the features of the Moral Prerogative that make it an attractive principle do not transfer to the Prudential Prerogative, and that Life Holism can better account for the perspectival and non-summative features of the normative phenomena Kamm wants to capture while retaining a tight connection between reasons and goodness. (shrink)

Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one’s mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation, while other criticism targets contingent features of Deep Self views that ought to be abandoned. To aid in this project, I provide original (...) naturalistic analyses of “Self” and “internality” that replace the view’s metaphorical language with common-sensical concepts that make clear their usefulness. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life puts forth a view that individual experiences could provide us with sources of endless fascination, motivation, and value if only we could live forever to continue to enjoy them. In this article I advocate for more caution about embracing this picture by pointing to three points of tension in Fischer's book. First, I argue that taking meaningfulness in life to be holistic is not compatible with the view immortal lives would be (...) recognizably humanlike. Next, I interrogate Fischer’s claim that that worries about boredom in immortal lives are predicated on the false view that our pursuits are compelling to us because we value them instrumentally, showing that he relies on a more controversial view of the value of our pursuits. Finally, I argue that Fischer’s naturalistic reinterpretation of the value of Near-Death experiences falls somewhat short of capturing their poignancy. Given Fischer’s seeming acknowledgment that what we get from an experience is sometimes ineffable, I argue that he ought to be less skeptical that a genuine Near-Death Experience would give the person experiencing it some (defeasible) evidence of the supernatural. (shrink)

Pandemic-related restrictions can be especially tragic for people whose lives are ending; it seems that the needs and desires of people who are dying should be given extra consideration. Given an additivist view of well-being, however, the last weeks of a person's life can only matter so much relative to the rest of the life they had. This article reflects on the end of my mother's life during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to make the case that the additive view (...) of well-being is part of a broader trend of dehumanizing emergency ethics. (shrink)

I argue in favor of the Minimal Approval account, an original account of an agent’s moral responsibility for her actions, understood as the conditions that must be met so that an agent’s actions speak for her such that she can appropriately be blamed on their basis. My account shares a general theoretical orientation with Deep Self views, but diverges in several respects. I argue that Deep Self views tend to seriously over-generate exemptions, such that agents are exempt from responsibility even (...) from ordinary weak-willed actions. Accordingly, much of my focus is on giving a more nuanced, and in certain senses narrower, explanation of genuine exemption cases. While I address the advantages the Minimal Approval account has over competing accounts throughout these chapters, the account also aims to provide an empirically informed response to a certain sort of skeptical worry about how it could be the case that anyone is ever responsible for what they do at all. One commonplace thought is that when agents’ behaviors are due to compulsion their “brains make them do it.” But, in a literal sense, it might seem that our brains make all of us do everything that we do. In this dissertation I head off this worry by directly addressing both what the difference is, and what it should mean for our practices. (shrink)

Abstract:Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights—proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates—is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of these challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property (...) we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires thinking about IP as shared rights. A network approach to IP challenges a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective. (shrink)

Ned O'Gorman's Politics for Everybody is, at its core, a defense of politics for our polarized times. In an accessible and impassioned style, O'Gorman argues for a political middle ground, which is not aligned with any particular party or ideology, but which embraces the worth, value, and importance of politics itself. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, O'Gorman shows how political thinking is rooted in common sense and everyday experiences, and is rooted in all of us, even and especially (...) when politics is the last thing we want to talk about. Resisting the deadening of political experience by the bombast of contemporary media, the impoverishment of public discourse, and the low-minded violence of smear campaigns, O'Gorman calls for a purer, simpler relation to politics, one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange, which can be critical without being hateful. Politics for Everybody is, in short, a defense of the dignity of politics in the age of its infamy, and a plea for the notion that to give politics a thinking chance, we must take it more seriously, not write it off. (shrink)

Examines the history and the consequences of living in the contemporary culture of forgetfulness.

Introduction The contemporary study of society is fired by our quest for scientific truth. The very spirit of our age is tangible evidence ...

Chronicling the emergence of an international society in the 1920s, Daniel Gorman describes how the shock of the First World War gave rise to a broad array of overlapping initiatives in international cooperation. Though national rivalries continued to plague world politics, ordinary citizens and state officials found common causes in politics, religion, culture and sport with peers beyond their borders. The League of Nations, the turn to a less centralized British Empire, the beginning of an international ecumenical movement, international (...) sporting events and audacious plans for the abolition of war all signaled internationalism's growth. State actors played an important role in these developments and were aided by international voluntary organizations, church groups and international networks of academics, athletes, women, pacifists and humanitarian activists. These international networks became the forerunners of international NGOs and global governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies:Human Nature in UtopiaGorman BeauchampIUtopists view man as a product of his social environment. Nothing innate in the psychic make-up of man—no inherent flaw in his nature, no inheritance of original sin—prevents his being perfected, or at least radically ameliorated, once the social structure that shapes character can be properly reordered. Utopists, in short, deny that there is such a thing as "human nature"—if, as (...) John Plamenatz suggests, to say that something is human nature is just another way of saying that it cannot be changed.1 To accept the psychic constitution of man as fixed, immutable, is anathema to utopists, who agree rather with Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no nature. What he has is history."2 The social conditions that have obtained historically, that is to say, have made man what he has been—anything but utopian; but if man's history could be changed, so could his "nature." The idea of Progress, so pervasive in the West from the seventeenth century on, lends some credence to this contention. W. D. Howells's Altrurians, their creator notes, "get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalist world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things were once human nature, which is always changing...."3 Utopia is merely a means, then, of imaginatively expediting, directing, culminating the historically progressive creation of a morally exemplary race of men.The environmentalist psychology espoused by utopists springs from one of two anterior assumptions (although in the creation of many fictional idola the distinction between them is often blurred). The first [End Page 280] assumption is formulated most famously by Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality: that "man is naturally good, and only by his institutions is he made bad."4 The second assumption is formulated most famously by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding: that the mind—and by extension the character—is a tabula rasa that takes impression from the stimuli exerted by the external world and thus is neither innately good or bad, but plastic, malleable.5 An intriguing conflation of these two theories operates, for instance, in the psyche of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the long middle section of the book, where the monster's side of the story is presented sympathetically, his character develops in a text-book demonstration of Lockean psychology; yet, at the same time, this lumbering tabula rasa quivers with enough benevolence (the implausible provenance of which mystifies) to put most saints to shame. He becomes evil and destructive only after being persecuted unmercifully for his misshapen appearance.6 Indeed, the criminal career of Mary Shelley's monster rehearses the common utopian argument that society's injustice to man (or monster) is the source of his crimes. "With our present state of society," writes James Casey in A New Moral World (1885), "we manufacture criminals and then punish them for being so."7 H. G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia (1905), concurs: "Crime and bad lives are the measure of the State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."8 And both are but restating the charge of Sir Thomas More's Raphael Hytholoday, leveled several centuries earlier in the original Utopia (1519): "If you allow people to be badly brought up and their habits to be corrupted little by little from childhood and if you then punish them for crimes to which their early training has disposed them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it?"9 Evil deeds, then, to reiterate the utopist's point, result not from some vicious mole in human nature, but from the malfunctioning of society itself. Utopia, by contrast, is—or theoretically ought to be—a world without crime.Rousseau's concept of the innate goodness of man and the evil of his institutions most often informs primitivist models of utopia, exotic worlds inhabited by noble savages uncorrupted by civilization. The idealized Indians of Montaigne's essay... (shrink)

This paper answers several open questions around structures with o‐minimal open core. We construct an expansion of an o‐minimal structure by a unary predicate such that its open core is a proper o‐minimal expansion of. We give an example of a structure that has an o‐minimal open core and the exchange property, yet defines a function whose graph is dense. Finally, we produce an example of a structure that has an o‐minimal open core and definable Skolem functions, but is not (...) o‐minimal. (shrink)

There is no consensus on how to define substance, but one popular view is that substances are entities that are independent in some sense or other. E. J. Lowe’s version of this approach stresses that substances are not dependent on other particulars for their identity. I develop the meaning of this proposal, defend it against some criticisms, and then show that others do require that the theory be modified.

Subjectivism about normativity (SN) is the view that norms are never intrinsic to things but are instead always imposed from without. After clarifying what SN is, I argue against it on the basis of its implications concerning intentionality. Intentional states with the mind-to-world direction of fit are essentially norm-subservient, i.e., essentially subject to norms such as truth, coherence, and the like. SN implies that nothing is intrinsically an intentional state of the mind-to-world sort: its being such a state is only (...) a status relative to the imposition of a norm. If one rejects this view of mind-to-world states, then one has grounds for rejecting SN itself. If one accepts it, an infinite regress arises that makes it impossible for norms to be imposed, which means that SN has undermined itself. (shrink)

The phrase ‘trading zone’ is often used to denote any kind of interdisciplinary partnership in which two or more perspectives are combined and a new, shared language develops. In this paper we distinguish between different types of trading zone by asking whether the collaboration is co-operative or coerced and whether the end-state is a heterogeneous or homogeneous culture. In so doing, we find that the voluntary development of a new language community—what we call an inter-language trading zone—represents only one of (...) four possible configurations. In developing this argument we show how different modes of collaboration result in different kinds of trading zone, how different kinds of trading zone may be ‘nested’ inside each other and discuss how a single collaboration might move between different kinds of trading zone over time. One implication of our analysis is that interactional expertise is a central component of at least one class of trading zone.Keywords: Trading zones; Interactional expertise; Interdisciplinarity; Creole. (shrink)

The notion of common ground is important for the production of referring expressions: In order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what information is privileged may require gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too intensive to affect the earliest moments of production. Previous work has found that speakers produce overinformative referring expressions, which include privileged names, (...) violating Grice’s Maxims, and concluded that this is because they do not mark the distinction between shared and privileged information. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in marking this distinction in the form of their utterances. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, speakers choose to overspecify privileged names. (shrink)

Le fondateur du positivisme ne s'est pas contente d'exposer ses theories dans deux series de grandes oeuvres constructives, il en a presente aussi des sortes de syntheses, de resumes exoteriques, destines a un public plus large. Le Discours sur l'esprit positif (1844), discours preliminaire au Traite philosophique d'astronomie populaire, avait ainsi ete concu par Comte comme une sorte de manifeste systematique de la nouvelle ecole. La grande loi sur l'evolution intellectuelle de l'humanite vers l'esprit positif y est developpee jusque dans (...) ses consequences sociales, educatives et emancipatrices. C'est dans les lois des phenomenes que consiste reellement la science, a laquelle les faits proprement dits, quelques exacts et nombreux qu'ils puissent etre, ne fournissent jamais que d'indispensabes materiaux. Or, en considerant la destination constante de ces lois, on peut dire, sans aucune exageration, que la veritable science, bien loin d'etre formee de simples observations, tend toujours a dispenser, autant que possible, de l'exploration directe, en y substituant cette prevision rationnelle qui constitue, a tous egards, le principal caractere de l'esprit positif. (shrink)

Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team cognition. Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) theory posits that (1) team cognition is an activity, not a property or a product; (2) team cognition should be measured and studied (...) at the team level; and (3) team cognition is inextricably tied to context. There are implications of ITC for theory building, modeling, measurement, and applications that make teams more effective performers. (shrink)

Jean Ayres invented Sensory Integration for children experiencing learning and social difficulties because, according to Ayres, they could not adequately integrate information from multiple sensory modalities. She established a scientific basis for her identification of children with sensory integrative difficulties, using statistical techniques to identify symptoms and neuroscience to determine a cause. She was an unusually reflective practitioner who catalyzed a community of practice around SI without becoming a guru—indeed, she encouraged her students to come up with their own ideas (...) and test them empirically. She felt isolated from the growing field of Occupational Therapy yet is viewed as one of its greatest pioneers. After her death in 1988, the SI community gradually began to argue about fundamental issues like what should constitute an appropriate diagnosis and set of tests for SI. At present, the network is fragmented to the point where some of the opposing positions may be incommensurable with each other, which would require a trading zone. (shrink)

Ong and Derrida are concerned with presence—for Ong the presence of the other; for Derrida the presence of the signified. These seemingly disparate epistemological meanings of 'presence' actually share some striking similarities, but differ about how reason should be figured, that is, what metaphors should be used to conceptualize reason. This disagreement is fundamentally about what Ong called 'analogues for intellect.' After describing the history of Ong's and Derrida's concept of presence, we indicate how the ethical and religious implications Ong (...) and Derrida draw from 'presence' proceed logically from the analogues for intellect that each assumes. We will conclude, first, that these implications reveal a conflict of traditions—philosophy and rhetoric—but we also indicate how Ong's own rhetoric may permit dialogue between traditions. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Écrits de jeunesse 1816-1828".

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Prolegomena zur Historiosophie" verfügbar.

Temps et sujet : Sujet du temps? Temps du sujet? De quel temps peut-on parler? Où sont les temps? Comment les sciences sociales et plus particulièrement la psychologie peuvent-elles s'emparer des temps subjectifs? Peut-on parler d'une construction psychique de la perception du temps? L'Institut de Psychologie et Sciences Sociales d'Angers (IPSA) a constitué un groupe de recherche sur le thème du temps du sujet, de sa perception du temps et de son appréhension de la durée. Approches psychanalytique, anthropologique, philosophique se (...) mélangent, se coupent et se recoupent. Suite à des discussions contradictoires sur plus d'une année, ce sont neuf contributions qui tentent de définir ce que pour elles peut être le temps. Par ailleurs vous trouverez un index des différentes figures du temps et de ses signifiants dans l'œuvre de Lacan. (shrink)

Although Auguste Comte is conventionally acknowledged as one of the founders of sociology and as a key representative of positivism, few new editions of his writings have been published in the English language in this century. He has become virtually dissociated from the history of modern positivism and the most recent debates about it. Gertrud Lenzer maintains that the work of Comte is, for better or for worse, essential to an understanding of the modern period of positivism. This collection provides (...) new access to the work of Comte and gives practitioners of various disciplines the possibility of reassessing concepts that were first introduced in Comte's writings. Today much of the ordinary business of academic disciplines is conducted under the assumption that the realm of science is essentially separate from the realms of politics and science. A close reading of Comte will reveal how deeply such current ideas and theories were originally embedded in a particular political context. One of his central methodological principles was that the theory of society had to be removed from the arena of political practice precisely in order to control that practice by means of these same sciences. It is in Comte's work that the reader will be able to observe how the forces of social and political reaction began to be powerfully organized to combat the critical forces in its own and later eras. Auguste Comte and Positivism will be of importance to the work of philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, and historians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Locke, Literary Criticism, and PhilosophyDavid GormanLocke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy, by William Walker; xviii & 227 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, $54.95.Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is one of those large, difficult, canonical works that are cited a great deal more often than they are read. In the case of the Essay this syndrome has resulted in historical mythmaking which, while rightfully monumentalizing Locke’s book, has done (...) so at the expense of its actual or potential significance. Walker’s study is aimed at destroying the myths about the Essay while rethinking its significance, through a carefully rhetorical reading of its text.Rhetoric is, of course, one of the things which Locke—along with Bacon and Descartes—is held to have rejected from philosophical discourse. This image of Locke as a proponent of commonsensical empiricism and an opponent of rhetorically-oriented speculation is one of the mainstays of intellectual history—of several distinct histories, in fact: philosophical, literary, and linguistic. But, Walker argues, it is also a mythic image. He further holds that an attentive, unprejudiced reading of the Essay will illustrate this claim by showing the work to be imagistic through and through. The Locke who emerges from this [End Page 250] rereading is not the sworn enemy of those literary effects to which language lends itself, one who has proven convenient to the formulation of neat defenses of poetry (including rhetoric) against simple-minded epistemologues. Walker’s suggestion is that this Locke, not having existed, had to be invented. The Locke of the Essay as Walker rereads it is, instead, a thinker about mind, language, and their intertwined effects who stands much closer to Nietzsche than anyone might have thought previously. And this Locke is anything but the naive philosophical butt simply awaiting a sophisticated (meaning, linguistically-oriented) deconstruction of the kind associated with Nietzsche.As might be expected from this summary, the spirit of Paul de Man hovers over Walker’s project. But this is deconstruction with a difference (and what other kind is worthwhile?). On the one hand, Walker’s whole analysis follows the mandate laid down in de Man’s celebrated essay on “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (1978), which is to ignore the commonplaces of intellectual history about Locke and to look at the text of the Essay with an eye to what happens there (the relevant passage in de Man is quoted on p. 133). On the other hand, however, the result of following out de Man’s suggestion has been Walker’s discovery and demonstration of severe problems in de Man’s own treatment of Locke and his Essay, a treatment that depends for its effect very strongly on the kind of mythmaking that casts Locke and Nietzsche as antagonists, and more specifically Locke as the problem for which Nietzsche proves the diagnosis.Walker is in fact quite harsh on de Man in places. Thankfully, however, the relevant chapters of his book do more than provide a litany of “de Man’s flagrant violations of fact and reason” (p. 154)—though this is no bad place to start in reconsidering de Man’s analyses, which have all too easily acquired the status of received wisdom. The exemplary achievement of Walker’s book, aside from its careful scrutiny of Locke’s writing, is to have suggested criteria against which deconstructive readings can be judged (a task that deconstructors themselves have been inclined to shirk). After all this, what remains, meanwhile, of the Essay? “I find the Essay to be complicated...,” Walker asserts, modestly but pregnantly (p. xv). Another claim that his study enforces against de Manian orthodoxy is that literary and intellectual history is indeed still possible, not despite but precisely because of close linguistic analysis: the change that rhetorical reading brings to historical study is to show that literary history is more complicated than is often supposed.David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public LifeDavid GormanPoetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha C. Nussbaum; xii & 143 pp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, $20.00.This volume, a revision of lectures given in 1991, is a philosophical study comparing aspects of law and literature. The law in question is contemporary American case law (hence the reference to “Public Life” in the book’s subtitle). The literature (...) to which it is juxtaposed consists primarily of “realist social novels” (p. 87), represented chiefly by Dickens’s Hard Times, though with some attention also given to E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and to passages from Whitman’s poetry (quoted, characteristically, at some length). Nussbaum’s thesis is that both this kind of legal discourse and this kind—or kinds—of literary discourse constitute, involve, or otherwise rely upon an imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities. Thus lawyers have a great deal to learn from literature, insofar as contact with the capacious imaginations of a Dickens or a Whitman can only enlarge the sensibilities of those who read them in a sufficiently open-minded, reflective way.It may be both too kind and overly reductive to ascribe to Poetic Justice such a thing as a thesis. On the contrary, this compact book, like all of Nussbaum’s writings, teems with theories and theses. This is the main reason, I suppose, for the dichotomy of responses to Nussbaum: some find this pullulating quality of her work exhilarating, while others just find it annoying. One advantage that I think both parties will recognize in the compactness of Poetic Justice (due to the constraints of the lecture format) is that it inhibits the author’s native prolixity, which makes her previous books—The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Love’s Knowledge (1990), and The Therapy of Desire (1994)—something of an effort even for Nussbaum’s biggest fans to stay with through every last qualification, tertiary argument, and cross-reference. [End Page 196]The opening pages of these lectures seem, if anything, all too simple. Nussbaum’s initial target is the economistic, deterministic school of social analysis associated with the University of Chicago generally and with Richard Posner in particular, which has lately exercised a disproportionate influence in American jurisprudence and—especially during the Reagan-Bush era—in public policymaking. Against this kind of thinking, which attempts to treat human beings and their actions and decisions as much as possible in terms of quantifiable, statistical measures, Nussbaum emphasizes the autonomy, the irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person’s experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home—hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism. Thus readers will tend to assume from the first lecture (“The Literary Imagination”) that what they are in for, pretty much, is something like Bob Cratchit’s comeback to Ebenezer Scrooge. The Dickensian comparison is not fortuitous, of course, because although the text of reference is Hard Times and not A Christmas Carol, the moral antithesis is familiar enough: a coldly, blindly all-embracing utilitarianism versus a warm, empathetic humanism.Yet, as Nussbaum develops her account, things are not so simple. What emerges is that her aim is not simply to mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing (and thus judging) human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview. This empathetic response to Chicago-style social analysis, in turn, weaves itself into the texture of Nussbaum’s book in two ways. For one thing, it supports her call to treat literature as making a potentially significant contribution to public life, since what better path can there be to understanding neo-utilitarians like Posner than via imaginative portrayals of such paleo-utilitarians as Mr. Gradgrind? For another thing, moreover, the very gesture of trying to empathize with economic determinism rather than trying to bury it serves the purpose of showing up the latter’s limitations, because this kind of other-directed response is just what the utilitarian approach is least... (shrink)