In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions. In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the most critical questions and considering whether the (...) answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

A topological space is hereditarilyk-irresolvable if none of its subspaces can be partitioned into k dense subsets. We use this notion to provide a topological semantics for a sequence of modal logics whose n-th member K4Cn\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {C}_n$$\end{document} is characterised by validity in transitive Kripke frames of circumference at most n. We show that under the interpretation of the modality ◊\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Diamond $$\end{document} as (...) the derived set operation, K4Cn\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {C}_n$$\end{document} is characterised by validity in all spaces that are hereditarily n+1\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n+1$$\end{document}-irresolvable and have the TD\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$_D$$\end{document} separation property. We also identify the extensions of K4Cn\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {C}_n$$\end{document} that result when the class of spaces involved is restricted to those that are crowded, or densely discrete, or openly irresolvable, the latter meaning that every non-empty open subspace is 2-irresolvable. Finally, we give a topological semantics for K4M, where M is the McKinsey axiom. (shrink)

Ayudha Puja, a South Indian festival translated as “worship of the machines,” is a dramatic example of how religion and science intertwine in political life. Across South India, but especially in the state of Karnataka, scientists and engineers celebrate the festival in offices, laboratories, and workshops by attending a puja led by a priest. Although the festival is noteworthy in many ways, one of its most immediate valences is political. In this article, we argue that Ayudha Puja normalizes Brahminical Hinduism (...) within scientific culture through the inclusion of non-Hindus and through scientists' description of the festival as “cultural” rather than “religious.”. (shrink)

Prestigious University is a large, private educational institution with a medical school, a university hospital, a law school, and graduate and undergraduate colleges all on a single campus. In the face of the Covid‐19 pandemic, students were told during spring break to return to campus only briefly to retrieve their belongings. Classes then went online. On March 23, 2020, the faculty, students, and staff were emailed the following by the university's director of infection control and public health: We have become (...) aware that a Prestigious University staff member has tested positive for the virus that causes Covid‐19. The individual, who was last on campus on March 16, is now in isolation at their permanent residence and is doing well clinically. The university has already identified those members of our community who may have been in close contact with this individual, and we are working to notify them. Further, this individual's local health department has a protocol for identifying people who have been in direct contact with anyone testing positive for Covid‐19 (such as this Prestigious University staff member) so that they can self‐quarantine and watch for COVID‐19 symptoms for a period of 14 days from their last contact with the infected individual.A professor in the Philosophy Department has asked the ethicists at the medical school whether such contact tracing suffices. “Don't the members of the community deserve to know who this is? Isn't there a mandate to identify this person in order to maximize public health benefits and slow the spread of this deadly virus?”. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 40-42.

In “Ethical and Legal Concerns Associated With the Comprehension of Legal Language and Concepts,” Joseph Wszalek (2017) discusses legal-language comprehension in the context of the attorney–client...

The most striking example of Roman intervention in the affairs of mainland Greece between the Achaean and Mithridatic Wars is provided by an inscription now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This stone bears the text of a letter to the city of Dyme in Achaea from a Roman proconsul named Q. Fabius Maximus, which describes his trial and sentencing of certain men of Dyme whom he had judged responsible for a recent disturbance in that city. One crux to be resolved (...) is chronological: A date of c. 115 b.c. has long been generally accepted, but recently evidence from another, still unpublished inscription has been thought to point to the year 144. Further, the letter of Fabius Maximus has long been held to exemplify the close supervision that most scholars, regardless of their position on the vexed question of Greece's formal status after 146, assume was exercised over Greece by Roman commanders in Macedonia from the time of the Achaean War. The document has also often been cited to bolster the claim that Rome pursued in second-century Greece a conscious policy of suppressing democracy or the political aspirations of the lower class. This is not, of course, the place for reassessment of these old, complex controversies. My purpose here is rather to show that interpretation of the letter of Fabius Maximus has not always been sufficiently mindful of the many obscurities of the text and, consequently, of the events that lie behind it; too often the great lacunae in our knowledge have been filled with assumptions that beg the questions that are under debate. (shrink)

Public health legal preparedness begins with effective legal authorities, and law provides a key foundation for public health practice in the United States. Laws not only create public health agencies and fund them, but also authorize and impose duties upon government to protect the public's health while preserving individual liberties. As a result, law is an essential tool in public health practice and is one element of public health infrastructure, as it defines the systems and relationships within which public health (...) practitioners operate.For purposes of this paper, law can be defined as a rule of conduct derived from federal or state constitutions, statutes, local laws, judicial opinions, administrative rules and regulations, international codes, or other pronouncements by entities authorized to prescribe conduct in a legally binding manner. Public health legal preparedness, a subset of public health preparedness, is defined as attainment of legal benchmarks within a public health system. (shrink)

The central thesis of this article is that academic freedom has indeed become a "canonical value" of American higher education, though not for the reasons that conventional wisdom might posit. As recently as a half century ago, few university administrators or governing boards felt constrained in dismissing or refusing to hire outspoken professors. The quite remote risk of potential legal liability for such adverse action posed a minor deterrent. The Supreme Court's first recognition of academic freedom came only in the (...) late 1950s, and matured only in the ensuing decade. Apart from judicial endorsement of this doctrine, some credit must be given to faculty organizations such as the American Association of University Professors, and to the gradual spread of collective bargaining in public higher education. Yet the soundest explanation for the "canonization" of academic freedom is a slightly different one - that respecting and protecting faculty rights became an increasingly critical element in the intense competition to attract and retain the most eminent scholars. Quite simply, no reputable institution of higher learning could risk a valid charge of disparaging or disrespecting the expressive rights of its professors. (shrink)

Are similar, or even identical, mechanisms used in the computational modeling of speech segmentation, serial image processing, and music processing? We address this question by exploring how TRACX2, a recognition‐based, recursive connectionist autoencoder model of chunking and sequence segmentation, which has successfully simulated speech and serial‐image processing, might be applied to elementary melody perception. The model, a three‐layer autoencoder that recognizes “chunks” of short sequences of intervals that have been frequently encountered on input, is trained on the tone intervals of (...) melodically simple French children's songs. It dynamically incorporates the internal representations of these chunks into new input. Its internal representations cluster in a manner that is consistent with “human‐recognizable” melodic categories. TRACX2 is sensitive to both contour and proximity information in the musical chunks that it encounters in its input. It shows the “end‐of‐word” superiority effect demonstrated by Saffran et al. (1999) for short musical phrases. The overall findings suggest that the recursive autoassociative chunking mechanism, as implemented in TRACX2, may be a general segmentation and chunking mechanism, underlying not only word‐ and image‐chunking, but also elementary melody processing. (shrink)

Richard Martin's thoroughly philosophical as well as thoroughly tech nical investigations deserve continued and appreciative study. His sympathy and good cheer do not obscure his rigorous standard, nor do his contemporary sophistication and intellectual independence obscure his critical congeniality toward classical and medieval philosophers. So he deals with old and new; his papers, in his neat self-descriptions, consist of reminders, criticisms, and constructions. They might also be seen as studies in the understanding of truth, ramifying as widely in mathematics, logic, (...) and epistemology as well as metaphysics, as such understanding has required. For us it is a pleasant occasion to welcome Richard Martin's new Boston Studies, and to note his continuously con collection to the structive and critical interventions at the Boston Colloquium for the of Science. Philosophy Boston University Center for the R. S. COHEN Philosophy and History of Science M. W. WARTOFSKY July 1979 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE vii PREFACE xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv I. Truth and Its Illicit Surrogates II. Some Reminders concerning Truth, Satisfaction, and Reference 17 III. On Disquotation and Intensionality 30 IV. On Truth, Belief, and Modes of Description 42 V. The Pragmatics of Self-Reference 55 VI. On Suppositio and Denotation 72 VII. Of Time and the Null Individual 82 VIII. Existence and Logical Form 95 IX. Tense, Aspect, and Modality 110 X. Of 'Of' 130 XI. Events and Actions: Brand and Kim 144 XII. Why I Am Not a Montague Grammarian 160 XIII. (shrink)

Professionalism is demonstrated through attitudes and behaviors. Medical education is concerned with teaching and evaluating it among students. It is often bioethicists who teach professionalism to medical students. Most bioethics curricula use lectures and group discussions to introduce principles and theories, but there is variation in number of credit and contact hours, placement in the curriculum and alongside which courses bioethics is placed), the extent of individual mentoring, and the emphasis placed on any particular philosophical approach. Bioethics curricula also vary (...) in whether and how explicitly and extensively they address topics, including professionalism, cultural competence, medical humanities, spirituality, death and dying, and community service, and in the number and topics of vignettes, controversies, assignments, and course activities. (shrink)

Mohanty, J.N. Understanding Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.--Fink, E. The problem of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Operative concepts in Husserl's phenomenology.--Funke, G. A transcendental-phenomenological investigation concerning universal idealism, intentional analysis, and the genesis of habitus: archē, phansis, hexis, logos.--Pentzopoulou-Valalas, T. Reflections on the foundation of the relation between the a priori and the eidos in the phenomenology of Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. Regions of being and regional ontologies in Husserl's phenomenology. The problem posed by the transcendental science of the a priori of the (...) life world.--Wahl, J. Notes on the first part of Experience and judgment by Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. A letter from Ludwig Landgrebe to Jean Wahl.-- Wahl, J. A note on some empiricist aspects of the thought of Husserl.--Toulemont, R. The specific character of the social according to Husserl. (shrink)

The non-financial effects (NFE) antitakeover amendment addresses the duties of company directors and management when faced with a possible takeover bid. The NFE amendment either permits or requires managers to consider the interests of the company's stakeholders during takeover bids. Other types of antitakeover devices have been viewed as protecting either stockholder or management interests. The NFE amendment would appear to protect a broad spectrum of interests including those of company employees, creditors, and the community in which the company operates. (...) Positive market returns to the adoption of NFE amendments provide some evidence that investors approve. The percent of both management and institutional ownership are positively related to the market reaction to the NFE amendment adoption. To the extent that institutional ownership proxies for the broad spectrum of stakeholder interest, NFE devices, unlike some other amendments that have been studied, appear to be in the interests of more than a single interest group. (shrink)

The non-financial effects (NFE) antitakeover amendment addresses the duties of company directors and management when faced with a possible takeover bid. The NFE amendment either permits or requires managers to consider the interests of the company's stakeholders during takeover bids. Other types of antitakeover devices have been viewed as protecting either stockholder or management interests. The NFE amendment would appear to protect a broad spectrum of interests including those of company employees, creditors, and the community in which the company operates. (...) Positive market returns to the adoption of NFE amendments provide some evidence that investors approve. The percent of both management and institutional ownership are positively related to the market reaction to the NFE amendment adoption. To the extent that institutional ownership proxies for the broad spectrum of stakeholder interest, NFE devices, unlike some other amendments that have been studied, appear to be in the interests of more than a single interest group. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Whole: Pluralism, Consensus, and the Transmutation of Bioethical Methods into Gold,” Patricia Martin identifies themes common to three emerging approaches to clinical bioethics--clinical pragmatism, ethics facilitation, and mediation-in order to develop an “ethical consensus method” that can serve as a “practical, step-by-step guide” for decision making She is to be applauded both for her identification of themes common to these three approaches and for her contribution to what we hope will be a growing literature on practical (...) methods for problem solving in clinical bioethics that take seriously the ideal of consensus. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Martin's working model, we focus the majority of our commentary on the notion of “consensus,” which is at the heart of her “ethical consensus method,” and the three approaches from which it is drawn. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Whole: Pluralism, Consensus, and the Transmutation of Bioethical Methods into Gold,” Patricia Martin identifies themes common to three emerging approaches to clinical bioethics--clinical pragmatism, ethics facilitation, and mediation-in order to develop an “ethical consensus method” that can serve as a “practical, step-by-step guide” for decision making She is to be applauded both for her identification of themes common to these three approaches and for her contribution to what we hope will be a growing literature on practical (...) methods for problem solving in clinical bioethics that take seriously the ideal of consensus. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Martin's working model, we focus the majority of our commentary on the notion of “consensus,” which is at the heart of her “ethical consensus method,” and the three approaches from which it is drawn. (shrink)

When a new, brain-based definition of death was proposed fifty years ago, no one realized that the issue would remain unresolved for so long. Recently, six new controversies have added to the debate: whether there is a right to refuse apnea testing, which set of criteria should be chosen to measure the death of the brain, how the problem of erroneous testing should be handled, whether any of the current criteria sets accurately measures the death of the brain, whether standard (...) criteria include measurements of all brain functions, and how minorities who reject whole-brain-based definitions should be accommodated. These controversies leave little hope of consensus on how to define death for social and public policy purposes. Rather, there is persistent disagreement among proponents of three major groups of definitions of death: whole-brain, cardiocirculatory or somatic, and higher-brain. Given the persistence and reasonableness of each of these groups of definitions, public policy should permit individuals and their valid surrogates to choose among them. (shrink)

No one really believes that literally all functions of the entire brain must be lost for an individual to be dead. A better definition of death involves a higher brain orientation.

Surgery is an important part of health care worldwide. Without access to surgical treatments, morbidity and mortality increase. Access to surgical treatment is a significant problem in global public health because surgical services are not equally distributed in the world. There is a disproportionate scarcity of surgical access in low-income countries. There are many charitable organizations around the world that sponsor surgical missions to under served nations. One such organization is Operation Smile International, a group with which both authors have (...) volunteered. This paper will describe the purpose and processes involved in Operation Smile and identify some of the key ethical issues that arise in short term medical volunteer work highlighting the importance of sustainability. (shrink)

Assesses the ethical problems that doctors face every day and advocates a more universal code of medical ethics, one that draws on the traditions of religion and philosophy.

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but (...) that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works-the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. (shrink)

When The Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death began meeting in 1967, I was a graduate student, with committee member Ralph Potter and committee chair Henry Beecher as my mentors. The question of when to stop life support on a severely compromised patient was not clearly differentiated from the question of when someone was dead. A serious clinical problem arose when physicians realized that a patient's condition was hopeless but life support perpetuated (...) body function. Thus, the committee stated that its first purpose was to deal with the burdens on patients and families as well as on hospitals and on patients needing hospital beds occupied by comatose patients. They intuited the strategy of “defining” these patients as dead, thus legitimating treatment stoppage. They noted that this would also serve a second purpose. Although the dead donor rule had not yet been clearly articulated, they claimed that defining patients as dead would also address controversy over obtaining organs for transplant.My mentors’ discussions related to my interest in the intersection between questions primarily of medical fact (When has a human brain irreversibly ceased functioning?) and nonmedical questions of social policy (Should we treat individuals with dead brains and beating hearts as dead humans?). It quickly became clear that most committee members did not appreciate the interplay of these questions. (shrink)

It is not too great an exaggeration to claim that On the Origin of Species was, along with Das Kapital, one of the two most significant works in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. As George Henry Lewes wrote in 1868, ‘No work of our time has been so general in its influence’. However, the very generality of the influence of Darwin’s work provides the chief problem for the intellectual historian. Most books and articles on the subject assert the (...) influence but remain very imprecise about its nature. It is very difficult indeed to assess what it was about the Darwinian theory which was so influential and how its influence was felt. This problem in Victorian intellectual history intersects with a related one in the history of science. There has been a tendency on the part of historians of science to isolate Darwin in two related ways. The first is to single him out from the mainstream of nineteenth-century naturalism in Britain and allow ‘Darwinism’ to stand duty for the wider movement of which it was in fact but a part. The second is the tendency to single out his evolutionary theory and to demarcate it sharply from those of his predecessors and contemporaries. According to this interpretation Darwin stood alone as a real, empirical scientist and provided the first genuinely scientific hypothesis for the process by which evolution might have occurred. The theories of the other main evolutionists—Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and Wallace—were more or less besmirched by ideological, anthropomorphic, or other ‘non-scientific’ factors or by the uses to which they were put by their authors. Charles Darwin is thus made to stand out as a figure of comparatively unalloyed scientific status and is treated in relative isolation from the social and intellectual context in which he worked and into which his theory was received. (shrink)

This book shows that the repeated announcements of the death of Hegel's philosophical system have been premature. Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom, Reality, and God brings to light accomplishments for which Hegel is seldom given credit: unique arguments for the reality of freedom, for the reality of knowledge, for the irrationality of egoism, and for the compatibility of key insights from traditional theism and naturalistic atheism. The book responds in a systematic manner to many of the major criticisms leveled at Hegel's (...) system, from Feuerbach and Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Charles Taylor. It provides detailed interpretations of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, large parts of his indispensable Science of Logic, and important parts of his Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Right. Unlike many academic books on Hegel, this one treats him very much as a 'live' thinker, whom we can learn from today. (shrink)

The dead donor rule (DDR) governs procuring life-prolonging organs. They should be taken only from deceased donors. Miller and Truog have proposed abandoning the rule when patients have decided to forgo life-sustaining treatment and have consented to procurement. Organs could then be procured from living patients, thus killing them by organ procurement. This proposal warrants careful examination. They convincingly argue that current brain or circulatory death pronouncement misidentifies the biologically dead. After arguing convincingly that physicians already cause death by withdrawing (...) treatment, they claim no bright-line differences preclude organ removal from the living. The argument fails for those who accept the double effect doctrine or other grounds for distinguishing forgoing life support from active, intentional killing. If the goal is determining irreversible loss of somatic function, they correctly label current death pronouncement a “legal fiction.” Recognizing a second, public policy meaning of the term death provides grounds for maintaining the DDR without jeopardizing procurement. (shrink)

This anthology of major classical and contemporary views on key ethical aspects of death and dying is the only philosophically sophisticated, interdisciplinary, and up-to-date introduction to the subject available. Pairs pro and con arguments to give a balanced perspective. Covers a range of topics that reflect the latest developments at the frontier of the field. Provides clearly and carefully written section introductions that define the issues to be discussed. Introduces each selection with a brief editorial essay. Features up-to-date and solid (...) analyses of all issues. Offers an excellent introduction to ethical theory. (shrink)

_Plato's Dialectical Ethics,_ Gadamer's earliest work, has now been translated into English for the first time. This classic book, published in 1931 and reprinted in 1967 and 1982, is still important today. It is one of the most extensive and imaginative interpretations of Plato's _Philebus_ and an ideal introduction to Gadamer's thinking. It shows how his influential hermeneutics emerged from the application of his teacher Martin Heidegger's phenomenological method to classical texts and problems. The work consists of two chapters. The (...) first, which puts Socratic/Platonic dialectics and ethics in the context of Gadamer's thinking about how we come to shared understanding through conversation, helps to clarify the intentions and trajectory of all Gadamer's subsequent work. The second chapter, on the _Philebus, _will interest everyone who is concerned with the connection between Plato's discussions of ethics and those of Aristotle, and with the substantive issues of the relation between pleasure and reason that Plato explores and Gadamer interprets. This edition includes a new and useful introduction by the translator, Robert M. Wallace. (shrink)