Economic analysis identifies comparative, rather than absolute, advantage as the basis of international trade, a distinction first thought to have been clearly made by David Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation . Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is thought to have failed to make this distinction, instead treating foreign trade principally as a “vent” for surplus domestic produce. However, Smith's underlying argument in favour of a “system of natural liberty” made his name synonymous with open seas and (...) free markets, and the economist most closely linked to free trade. This paper suggests that Smith advanced a rather more sophisticated analysis of the gains from trade than this textbook understanding would suggest, but that his line of reasoning has long been obscured by the long-established habit of reading Wealth of Nations as a work whose first two books contain the important analytical elements that the later books merely elaborate. It is demonstrated that Smith's analysis of the gains from trade derives from his discussion of capital, and that therefore a reader needs to begin at the end of Book II, and not with the principles of exchange outlined in Book I. (shrink)

Saunkeah et al. analyze the aptness of extending the Belmont Principles of Respect for Persons, Beneficence and Justice to AI/AN tribal communities as a whole. They argue that to protect AI/...

Japan’s economy has stagnated since the bursting of the twin real estate and stock bubbles in 1990. Construction employment rose after the bubbles burst despite a real estate glut.Systemic corruption is delaying recovery. The key is the dango—Japan’s system of bid rigging, which is pervasive in public construction. The firms rotate who will win the “competitive” bid. The bureaucrats leak the highest price bid that will be accepted in return for favors from the industry and lucrative sinecures when they retire (...) (amakudari—“descent from heaven”). The ruling politicians (the “construction tribes”) get kickbacks and ensure the adoption of enormous public construction programs.The result is that Japanese public and private capital flows are corruptly routed to uses that are not simply inefficient, but outright harmful to society. Pervasive corruption is the primary obstacle to Japanese economic (and environmental) health and political reform. (shrink)

There is no consensus among scholars of myth as to how the central concept of their field should be defined. What is a ‘myth’ and how does it differ from a ‘belief’? Moreover, scholars have argued for a homological relationship between myth and ritual. Semantically, the word ‘myth’ has a connotation of disbelief in ‘superstition’, and the word ‘belief’ should be substituted when talking about religious practices. Likewise, the word ‘ritual’ may be substituted with ‘ceremonial’, which has connotations that are (...) more positive. Earlier publications that associate ancestral veneration with the words ‘myth’ or ‘superstition’ display a judgemental view of the beliefs of other cultures. In this article, the author attempts, via recourse to the use of the word ‘myth’, to describe and interpret traditional and cultural belief systems among the Bapedi people of Limpopo Province in South Africa. It is argued that myth should not be reduced to ritual nor ritual to myth. Belief and ritual, in Bapedi religion and belief systems, complete and complement each other, thus allowing the harmonious unison of meta and paralinguistic elements in religiocultural discourse. The focus of this study is to explore and document these links within the context of the Bapedi culture. (shrink)

Japan’s economy has stagnated since the bursting of the twin real estate and stock bubbles in 1990. Construction employment rose after the bubbles burst despite a real estate glut.Systemic corruption is delaying recovery. The key is the dango—Japan’s system of bid rigging, which is pervasive in public construction. The firms rotate who will win the “competitive” bid. The bureaucrats leak the highest price bid that will be accepted in return for favors from the industry and lucrative sinecures when they retire (...) (amakudari—“descent from heaven”). The ruling politicians (the “construction tribes”) get kickbacks and ensure the adoption of enormous public construction programs.The result is that Japanese public and private capital flows are corruptly routed to uses that are not simply inefficient, but outright harmful to society. Pervasive corruption is the primary obstacle to Japanese economic (and environmental) health and political reform. (shrink)

Before the intervention of the missionaries in Bapedi society, the traditional beliefs, customs and practices, such as traditional healing, circumcision, polygamy, indigenous music and rituals, had a vibrant existence. These practices had been prevalent for centuries before the arrival of Christianity. After the missionaries of all church denominations were welcomed in Bapedi society to establish churches and schools as the main vehicles for the dissemination of European culture, confusion started to build. In this article, I will highlight the reaction of (...) Bapedi people of Sekhukhune district, Limpopo province, South Africa, to the missionary activities of Berlin Mission Society, Germany, from 19 July 1860 to 08 July 2018. The purpose of this study was to explain the conflict or integration of different cultural norms and the missionary influence on the Bapedi indigenous way of life. The questions that I attempt to answer in this article are: how do people understand one another when they do not share a common cultural experience? and who are to blame, the missionaries or the Bapedi people themselves? I address this question by analysing the missionary influence on Bapedi traditional beliefs, customs and practices. Primary data were collected through video recordings of cultural and religious rituals, interviews and observations. Secondary data include publications. It was concluded that in spite of fundamental and multi-consequential changes that Christianity brought about in Bapedi society, a large percentage of Bapedi people, independent churches inclusive, have used and are still following their traditional beliefs, taboos, customs and practices. (shrink)

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The (...) Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups. (shrink)

Recent research has focused on establishing the values of preserving biodiversity both in agriculture and in less managed ecosystems, and in showing the importance of the role of cultural diversity in preserving biodiversity in food production systems. A study of the philosophy embedded in cultural systems can reveal the importance of the technological information for preserving genetic biodiversity contained in such systems and can be used to support arguments for the protection/preservation of cultural diversity. For example, corn or maize can (...) serve as a paradigm of Native American thinking and can provide one of the few areas from which common philosophical conceptions can emerge. An examination of the cultivation of corn or maize as an agricultural activity and as a cultural activity in Native American literature reveals a philosophy that recognizes the importance of biodiversity and provides techniques for its preservation. Corn, and the food and the materials derived from it, is something thought out, not by specialists, but by the entire tribe and its ancestors, even if this thinking is done within what we might consider a framework of highly mythical notions. Importantly, this framework yields an understanding of both the genetics and nutrition of corn. A survey of these mythical notions (myths and stories) and agricultural practices makes this thought explicit and exemplifies the value of cultural diversity and biodiversity. (shrink)

Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary (...) array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events. (shrink)

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

Putative counterexamples to the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) are notoriously inconclusive. I establish ground rules for debate in this area, offer a new response to such counterexamples for friends of the PII, but then argue that no response is entirely satisfactory. Finally, I undermine some positive arguments for PII.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Philosophy has much to offer psychiatry, not least regarding ethical issues, but also issues regarding the mind, identity, values, and volition. This has become only more important as we have witnessed the growth and power of the pharmaceutical industry, accompanied by developments in the neurosciences. However, too few practising psychiatrists are familiar with the literature in this area. -/- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry offers the most comprehensive reference resource for this area ever published. It assembles challenging and (...) insightful contributions from key philosophers and others to the interactive fields of philosophy and psychiatry. Each contributions is original, stimulating, thorough, and clearly and engagingly written - with no potentially significant philosophical stone left unturned. Broad in scope, the book includes coverage of several areas of philosophy, including philosophy of mind, science, and ethics. For philosophers and psychiatrists, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry is a landmark publication in the field - one that will be of value to both students and researchers in this rapidly growing area. (shrink)

The “Adam Smith Problem” is the name given to an argument that arose among German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature advanced in, respectively, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Wealth of Nations (1776). During the twentieth century these arguments were forgotten but the problem lived on, the consensus now being that there is no such incompatibility, and therefore no problem. Rather than rehearse the arguments (...) for and against compatibility and incompatibility, this paper returns to the German writers of the 1850s–1890s and demonstrates that their engagement in this argument represents the foundation of modern Smith scholarship. It is shown that the “problem” was not simply a mistake best forgotten, but the first sustained scholarly effort to understand the importance of Smith's work, an effort that lacked any parallel in English commentary of the time. By the 1890s British writers, overwhelmingly ignorant of German commentary, assumed that there was little more to be said about Smith's work. Belated international familiarity with this German “Problem” played a major role in transforming Smith from a simple partisan of free trade into a theorist of commercial society and human action. ☆ This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Dogmenhistorischer Auschuss of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Lüdinghausen, June 2007. I would like to thank all those attending for their very helpful comments. In places I here draw upon material included in my essays on the Smith reception in A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (edited by Keith Tribe, with Hiroshi Mizuta), Pickering and Chatto, London 2002, but do so in order to make a new argument concerning the contribution of German scholarship to modern Adam Smith scholarship. (shrink)

This book provides an overview of two hundred years of German economic thought, from the Staatswissenschaften of the eighteenth century to National Socialism and the Social Market. Whereas classical economics, from Smith through Ricardo to Marx and Mill, emphasised value, distribution and production, German economic thought had a long-running tradition of human need and the varying conditions for order. These ideas are brought together by a conception of rational action and, therefore, a rationalistic appraisal of welfare and order. By taking (...) this perspective, the usual contrast of market and planning approaches to economic organisation is subsumed by an approach which focuses on the construction of order in economic processes. This book highlights the continuity of this practical approach of German economists through the two centuries under consideration - from the Cameralists to the Ordoliberals. (shrink)

DaB fUr die Entwicklung der Phanomenologie Husserls nicht zuletzt auch,wissenschaftstheoretische' Motive ausschlaggebend waren, ist hinreichend bekannt. Umso mehr verwundert es, daB die Husserl-Rezeption sich diese Motive nur selten zueigen gemacht hat. Zwar sind in einer Reihe von Einzel­ wissenschaften, wie in der Literaturwissenschaft, der Sozialwissenschaft und besonders auch der Psychologie, phanomenologische Motive wirksam gewor­ den. Versuche einer ausdriicklichen wissenschaftskritischen Anwendung der Husserlschen Philosophie auf einzelwissenschaftliehe Theorien jedoch, wie sie z.B. Alfred Schiitz in seinem friihen Werk zur phanomenologischen Grundlegung der "verstehenden (...) Soziologie"l ansatzweise unternommen hat, sind rar. Freilich ging auch Husserl hier nieht eben mit gutem Beispiel voran. Auch er selbst hat seine wissenschaftstheoretische Programmatik nirgends einer ernsthaften Bewahrungsprobe unterzogen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung will diese Frage einer wissenschaftstheore­ tischen Anwendbarkeit der transzendentalen Phiinomenologie paradigmatisch im Hinblick auf die Problemstellungen der Geschiehtswissenschaft iiberprii­ fen. Was also kann die Phanomenologie fUr die Historik leisten? DaB sieh fiir eine solche Absieht gerade die geschichtstheoretischen Perspektiven in Hus­ serls Werk anbieten, hat vor allem zwei Griinde. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

This book looks at the distinctive features of the development of German economics & draws attention to its divergences from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The book covers the period when economics became established as a systematically taught discipline in German universities. It concentrates on the textbooks in use at the time, both because they were a major means by which economic ideas were disseminated, & for their use in the teaching of state officials.

Tribe, David Review(s) of: A Wealth of insights: Humanist Thought since the Enlightenment, by Bill Cooke Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011; ISBN 9781591027270.

Tribe, David The scientific disputation among Dr Victor Bien, Dr David Blair and myself in AH has, I hope, been of some interest to all readers. It smouldered with a dispute over the reality or unreality of anthropogenic global warming and climate change , with me for unreality in the minority, and flared with my assertion 'that scientific consensuses on all controversial issues are initially always wrong' . I adhere to both positions.

Tribe, David All serious journalists and debaters garnish their opinion pieces with facts and figures seen as 'corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative' . This apology for a lurid pack of lies in The Mikado has long been compared with statistics. Of course it's unjust. Nevertheless, investigation shows that statistics, widely used to interpret the past and present and forecast the future, to determine or justify public policy, are often unsatisfactory through (...) questionable processing of controversial, inadequate or bogus data. (shrink)

Tribe, David Dvorak, it is said, played to the mad: his resonance found consonance..

Tribe, David I was disappointed, but not surprised, by criticisms of my 'On science, good, bad and ugly' , which may also have prompted the appearance in the same issue of other articles confirming points in mine. While I don't agree with many details, Massimo Pigliucci's 'Science needs philosophy' directs timely attention to 'an over-enthusiastic embrace of science' and a scientism which 'leads to nihilism'.

Tribe, David In my reply to criticisms of my article 'On Death', I observed that 'the origin and nature of consciousness and self-awareness, though clearly related to brain function, are still hotly debated among scientists'. They are increasingly being joined in the fray by philosophers.

Tribe, David In reviewing Bill Cooke's Wealth of Insights (2011) (AH, Autumn 2012), I said that the age-old debate on freewill versus determinism is 'a major issue for neurophysiology, philosophy, jurisprudence and criminology'. I could have added religion, but here the debate takes on a slightly different form of freewill versus predestination (worth considering later) and appears to have divided on peaceful sectarian lines.

Tribe, David Victor Bien's 'Scientific authority: consensually agreed knowledge of nature' (AH, Winter 2012) has stimulated me to reply and dilate on other scientific principles. As a respected PhD in physical chemistry (and an IT authority) he's making a 'contribution to advancing secular ethics'. My credentials are those of a student of physical, biological, psychological and social sciences for over 60 years and author of many pieces on secular ethics, notably Nucleo-ethics: Ethics in Modern Society (1972).

Tribe, David Review of: On the nature being: A personal exploration into the origins of consciousness, by Geoffrey Collins, Geoffrey Collins and Creative Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2012-13. Amazon $US6 online.

Tribe, David When asked, we say we always speak the truth - in courts of law, the whole truth, nothing but the truth..

Tribe, David When asked, we say we always speak the truth - in courts of law, the whole truth, nothing but...

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor -- and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the (...) two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists. (shrink)