Israel Kirzner’s concept of “alertness” is recast in the language of phenomenological psychology. Our ideas about things are either openended ideas posing no particular problem of choice, “open possibilities”, or alternatives to choose between, “problematic possibilities”. Choice is the process of formulating problematic possibilities; it is the process of reinterpreting one’s situation. The fully formed reinterpretation generates the chosen outcome as a necessary consequence of preferences and perceived constraints. Reinterpretation precedes choice, both logically and temporally. This understanding of alertness helps (...) to clarify Austrian ideas such as the idea that preferences do not exist apart from action.Le concept de “vigilance” d’Israel Kirzner est reformulé dans le langage de la psychologie phéno- ménologique. Nos idées à propos des choses sont souvent des idées à finalité ouverte ne soulevant pas de problème particulier de choix, “des possibilités ouvertes”, ou des alternatives de choix entre des “possibilités problématiques”. Le choix est un processus de formulation de possibilités problématiques ; c’est le processus consistant à réinterpréter nos propres situations. Dans sa formulation ultime, la réinterprétation génère le résultat choisi comme conséquence nécessaire des préférences et des contraintes perçues. La réinterprétation précède le choix, et logiquement et temporellement. Cette compréhension de la vigilance aide à clarifier les idées Autrichiennes telle que l’idée selon laquelle les préférences n’existent pas indépendamment de l’action. (shrink)

Forensic science error rates are needlessly high. Applying the perspective of veritistic social epistemology to forensic science could produce new institutional designs that would lower forensic error rates. We make such an application through experiments in the laboratory with human subjects. Redundancy is the key to error prevention, discovery, and elimination. In the “monopoly epistemics” characterizing forensics today, one privileged actor is asked to identify the truth. In “democratic epistemics,” several independent parties are asked. In an experiment contrasting them, democratic (...) epistemics reduced the rate at which biased observers obscured the truth by two-thirds. These results highlight, first, the potential of “epistemic systems design,” which employs the techniques of economic systems design to address issues of veracity rather than efficiency, and second, the value of “experimental epistemology,” which employs experimental techniques in the study of science. (shrink)

The American criminal justice system creates incentives for false conviction. For example, many public crime labs are funded in part per conviction. We show that the number of false convictions per year in the American criminal justice system should be considered ?high.? We examine the incentives of police, forensic scientists, prosecutors, and public defenders in the U.S. Police, prosecutors, and forensic scientists often have an incentive to garner convictions with little incentive to convict the right person. These incentives create what (...) economists call a ?multitask problem? that seems to be resulting in a needlessly high rate of false convictions. Public defenders lack the resources and incentives needed to provide a vigorous defense for their clients. Corrective measures are discussed, along with a call for more research. (shrink)

Epistemic systems are social processes generating judgments of truth and falsity. I outline a mathematical theory of epistemic systems that applies widely. Areas of application include pure science, torture, police forensics, espionage, auditing, clinical medical testing, democratic procedure, and the market economy. I examine torture and police forensics in relative detail. This paper is an exercise in comparative institutional epistemics, which considers how the institutions of an epistemic system influence its performance as measured by such things as error rates and (...) the volume of judgments generated. (shrink)

L’activité entrepreneuriale génère l’activité entrepreneuriale. Cet article développe cette idée dans une perspective autrichienne. Nous envisageons les entrepreneurs kirznériens sous l’angle de l’apprentissage hayékien. L’activité entrepreneuriale développe l’activité entrepreneuriale de deux manières. Premièrement, la mise en oeuvre d’une nouvelle tentative crée de nouvelles opportunités pour d’autres nouvelles tentatives. Deuxièmement, chaque acte entrepreneurial kirznérien est un exemple incitant les autres à faire de même. Nous mettons l’accent sur le second point. Chaque nouvelle tentative entrepreneuriale modifie les perceptions des autres quant à (...) l’émergence des opportunités, aux gens qui peuvent les saisir, etc. Elle rend les gens plus vigilants. Ainsi, l’action entrepreneuriale crée des externalités positives. Ces externalités expliquent que des communautés, par ailleurs identiques, donnent lieu à des niveaux différents de tentatives entrepreneuriales.Entrepreneurship breeds entrepreneurship. This insight is developed within the context of Austrian economics. We view Kirznerian entrepreneurs as Hayekian learners. Entrepreneurship breeds entrepreneurship two ways. First, the founding of a new venture creates new opportunities for other new ventures. Second, each act of Kirznerian entrepreneurship is a favorable example for others to follow. We concentrate on the second point. Each act of newventure entrepreneurship changes the perceptions of others about how new ventures are founded, what sort of person might do it, and so on. It makes people more alert. Thus, entrepreneurship creates a network externality. This externality explains the fact that otherwise similar communities produce dissimilar levels of new-venture entrepreneurship. (shrink)

L’activité entrepreneuriale génère l’activité entrepreneuriale. Cet article développe cette idée dans une perspective autrichienne. Nous envisageons les entrepreneurs kirznériens sous l’angle de l’apprentissage hayékien. L’activité entrepreneuriale développe l’activité entrepreneuriale de deux manières. Premièrement, la mise en oeuvre d’une nouvelle tentative crée de nouvelles opportunités pour d’autres nouvelles tentatives. Deuxièmement, chaque acte entrepreneurial kirznérien est un exemple incitant les autres à faire de même. Nous mettons l’accent sur le second point. Chaque nouvelle tentative entrepreneuriale modifie les perceptions des autres quant à (...) l’émergence des opportunités, aux gens qui peuvent les saisir, etc. Elle rend les gens plus vigilants. Ainsi, l’action entrepreneuriale crée des externalités positives. Ces externalités expliquent que des communautés, par ailleurs identiques, donnent lieu à des niveaux différents de tentatives entrepreneuriales.Entrepreneurship breeds entrepreneurship. This insight is developed within the context of Austrian economics. We view Kirznerian entrepreneurs as Hayekian learners. Entrepreneurship breeds entrepreneurship two ways. First, the founding of a new venture creates new opportunities for other new ventures. Second, each act of Kirznerian entrepreneurship is a favorable example for others to follow. We concentrate on the second point. Each act of newventure entrepreneurship changes the perceptions of others about how new ventures are founded, what sort of person might do it, and so on. It makes people more alert. Thus, entrepreneurship creates a network externality. This externality explains the fact that otherwise similar communities produce dissimilar levels of new-venture entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Roger Koppl (2009, p. 1) argues that “Austrian economics is a school of thought within the broader complexity movement in economics.” Is he correct? While there are many who have argued for some overlapping between the two, I shall argue that this is probably an overly strong statement. The main reason is that there are substantial elements and strands within Austrian economics that do not fit in with any of the multiple varieties of complexity theory, even though there (...) are some that clearly do. While I have some disagreements with Koppl’s argument, I think that he does a good job of identifying some of the main strands of Austrian economics that are consistent with complexity thought. The most important of these are associated with the work of Friedrich A. Hayek, who.. (shrink)

Glenn Andrew Peoples has criticized my mind-body theory, emergentism or emergent dualism, on the grounds that it does not, as claimed, allow for the possibility of disembodied survival. I show that his criticisms are misplaced. His objections to my scientific analogies for mind-body emergence misstate what was said by the scientific authorities (Roger Penrose and Kip Thorne) on which I rely. And his philosophical argument relies on a definition of emergentism to which I do not subscribe.

This book is a fascinating and accessible summary of Roger Penrose's current thinking on those areas of physics in which he feels there are major...

The aesthetics of nature is a growing sub-field of contemporary aesthetics. In this article, I outline the view called ‘Scientific cognitivism’, which has been central in recent discussions of nature aesthetics. In assessing two important arguments for this view, I outline some recent thinking about key issues for the aesthetics of nature, including the relationship between nature and art and the relevance of ethical considerations to the aesthetic appreciation of nature.

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

This paper compares the ethical decisions and attitudes of business students and practitioners. Recent unpublished data from a national study of over 1600 students are contrasted with information reported previously. Students are found consistently to make less ethical choices than practitioners, and there is some indication that students are making less ethical choices in the 1980s than in the 1960s. In addition, both students and practitioners agree that buyers should beware, view the role of business more narrowly, and find fewer (...) incentives to behave ethically over time. Codes of ethics appear to be less influential than the individual's strong personal value system and one's superiors behaving ethically; support for codes is declining. The paper concludes with observations about the limitations and possibilities for survey research in this area drawing on other studies that used the same instrument utilized for this paper. Some implications for future research are suggested. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the position the Dutch environmental- philosopher Martin Drenthen develops on the philosophical import of the “wilderness-concept,” especially with regards to the practical implications he draws from it for nature-preservation-practices.By situating Drenthen’s work in the context of the Dutch debate on which kind of nature should serve as the basis for Dutch preservationist policies, I typify Drenthen’s position as inhering in the tension between an “engaged” environmental philosophy that tries to give a substantive account of (...) nature and a “meta” position that tries to criticize all substantive positions taken up within the debate.I show how by interpreting nature as “non-appropriable alterity” Drenthen succeeds in holding on to that tension, and how this nature-concept translates to the debate on preservationist strategies. By doing so, I grant Drenthen that his nature-concept has considerable merit in critiquing certain self-defeating forms of preservationist strategies.Next, I argue that by interpreting nature as “non-appropriable alterity,” Drenthen’s analysis can however be read as a plea for getting rid of historically grown intuitions surrounding nature-preservation, but that without such intuitions we cannot have a meaningful debate on which nature-preservation-measures are preferable over others. I then establish that many of our intuitions are derived from what is commonly known as the “Arcadian” tradition and that, although this tradition does seem to put forward a highly “external” nature concept, it can be seen as a starting-point for a “conversation process” with nature itself.My concluding claim is that an Arcadian tradition made flexible through such a “conversation process” does give us criteria for evaluating conservation practices, without the latter being reduced to simply projecting cultural idiosyncrasies upon nature, while the ultimate consequence of the Drenthian position is a situation in which everything is of equal value, whereby we loose all bearing when evaluating which conservation-practices are valuable and which not. (shrink)

The article sets out to reinterpret Heraclitus' views on religion and, by implication, his position in the context of the Presocratic philosophers' relationship to the Greek cultural tradition. It does so by examining the fragments in which Heraclitus' attitude to the popular religion of his time is reflected. The analysis of the fragments 69, 68, 15, 14, 5, 96, 93 and 92 DK reveals that the target of Heraclitus' criticism is not the religious practices themselves, but their popular interpretation. Heraclitus' (...) fragments are simultaneously shown to identify the underlying structure of the 'unity of opposites,' inherent in various religious practices. Heraclitus appears to reinterpret religious practices in terms of the conceptual structures of his own philosophy. On the other hand, religion provides him with the categories for the construction of his philosophical theology. Thus Heraclitus' treatment of religion is shown to be analogous to his treatment of ethics and politics, which he also tries to incorporate into his highly integrated vision of reality. In contrast to Xenophanes' radical critique of the traditional religion, Heraclitus emerges not as a reformer or an Aufklärer, but as an interpreter, who tries to discern the structures of meaning inherent in the existing practices, and to assume them into his own philosophical project. (shrink)

Roger Crisp presents a comprehensive study of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics, a landmark work first published in 1874. Crisp argues that Sidgwick is largely right about many central issues in moral philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics, consequentialism, hedonism about well-being, and the weight to be given to self-interest. He holds that Sidgwick's long discussion of 'common-sense' morality is probably the best discussion of deontology we have. And yet The Methods of Ethics can be hard to (...) understand, and this is perhaps one reason why, though it is a philosophical goldmine, few have ventured deeply into it. What does Sidgwick mean by a 'method'? Why does he discuss only three methods? What are his arguments for hedonism and for utilitarianism? How can we make sense of the idea of moral intuition? What is the role of virtue in Sidgwick's ethics? Crisp addresses these and many other questions, offering a fresh view of Sidgwick's text which will assist any moral philosopher to gain more from it. (shrink)

Efforts to bring science into early 19th century breeding practices in Central Europe, organised from Brno, the Hapsburg city in which Mendel would later turn breeding experiments into a body of timeless theory, are here considered as a significant prelude to the great discovery. During those years prior to Mendel's arrival in Brno, enlightened breeders were seeking ways to regulate the process of heredity, which they viewed as a force to be controlled. Many were specialising in sheep breeding for the (...) benefit of the local wool industry while others were showing an interest in commercial plants, especially fruit trees and vines, and later cereals. Breeders explained their problems in regulating heredity in terms of climatic influences disruption due to crossing sports or saltations. Practical experience led them to the concepts of 'inheritance capacity' and the 'mutual elective affinity' of parents. The former was seen to differ among individuals and also among traits; the latter was proposed as a means of adding strength to heredity. The breeders came to recognise that traits might be hidden and yet transmitted as a 'potential' to future generations. They also grew to understand that heredity would be strengthened when a quality was 'fixed' within a lineage by 'pure blood relations.' Continued selection of the desired quality might then lead to 'a higher perfection.' But the ultimate 'physiological' question about breeding, 'what is inherited and how?,' found no answer. Major figures in this development included Abbot Napp, the one who asked this question and who was due to receive Mendel into the monastery in 1843, and Professor Diebl whose lectures on agriculture and natural science at the Brno Philosophical Institute Mendel would attend in 1846. Here we analyse their progress in theorizing about breeding up until about 1840. In discussing this development, we refer to certain international contacts, especially with respect to information transfer and scientific education, within the wider context of the late Enlightenment. (shrink)

En este artículo, Roger Crisp nos presenta una interpretación de la teoría de la virtud de Hume. Crisp sostiene que el lugar central de la virtud en la ética de Hume le proporciona a Hume una posición extremadamente sofisticada que la ética de la virtud no puede ignorar. En particular, argumenta que aunque la posición de Hume pueda al final ser descrita como un utilitarismo de motivos, constituye en todo caso una forma extremadamente sofisticada de utilitarismo de motivos, una (...) forma de utilitarismo que puede volver imposible una ética de la virtud de raíz no-utilitarista. (shrink)

This paper examines the vulnerability of boys and young men to trafficking and sexual abuse/exploitation globally as an often-hidden problem. Exploration of the story of Joseph in Genesis and how he was trafficked to Egypt by his brothers and then sexually harassed by Potiphar’s wife will challenge a number of assumptions about vulnerability. The research that has been conducted in Cambodia and the Asia region demonstrates that boys and young men are indeed vulnerable and require our attention. Awareness and response (...) must go beyond stereotypes of what boys should be like to understanding their real context and needs. The paper will emphasize the importance of the Church and Christian faith-based organizations being driven not by donors or current political correctness, but instead focusing on a biblical mandate to work with the most marginalized. Further research is needed to identify exploited populations better, including diverse persons of age, gender, ethnicity disability/ability or sexuality. In addition, the paper will describe the importance of encouraging men in the church towards an authentic biblical masculinity where there is transparency and a deep respect for females and sex. It also promotes the idea of a community where boys and men, in and outside the church, can experience prevention and long-term healing. The restoration of men is needed in relation to buying sex, sexual abuse, pornography and other addictions, which drive the demand for exploitation and trafficking. This includes models of genuine father figures in the church and examples of Christian faith-based organizations that are seeking to challenge men to be better husbands, fathers and brothers. (shrink)

With the breakdown of traditional racial boundaries in many areas of the world, the widespread and growing consumption of skin-lightening products testifies to the increasing significance of colorism—social hierarchy based on gradations of skin tone within and between racial/ethnic groups. Light skin operates as a form of symbolic capital, one that is especially critical for women because of the connection between skin tone and attractiveness and desirability. Far from being an outmoded practice or legacy of past colonialism, the use of (...) skin lighteners is growing fastest among young, urban, educated women in the global South. Although global in scope, the skin-lightening market is highly segmented by nation, culture, race, and class. This article examines the “yearning for lightness” and skin-lightening practices in various societies and communities and the role of transnational pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations in fueling the desire for lighter skin through print, Internet, and television ads that link light skin with modernity, social mobility, and youth. (shrink)

Aristotelian ethics is widely accepted by many scholars as a practical science. However, this study showed that it is not after all a practical science but a speculative or theoretical science. Having employed textual analysis on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it was found out that eudaimonia the Highest Good/Chief Good which is the ultimate goal of Ethics is achieved not through action but through contemplation. Contemplation is the act not of the will but of intellect. Hence, the highest virtue or excellence (...) of man is the fulfilment of highest faculty which is reason in contemplation of the Chief Good. The Chief Good, which is characterized by Aristotle as final, complete, and Self-Sufficient End is not physical and concrete but rather incorporeal and abstract because such qualities cannot be found among corporeal entities. Thus, Aristotelian ethics is metaphysics; it is neither concrete nor practical. Moreover, happiness cannot be the Chief Good because happiness is merely an activity, a quality, and a disposition and an activity cannot be identified as end which is desired for its own sake. Therefore, the Chief Good must be a substance and this substance is the Final Cause/the Necessary Being which is the End of all ends and the Good of all goods. KEYWORDS: Philosophy, Aristotle, Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Metaphysics,Theoretical Science, Speculative Science, Descriptive Textual Analysis, Philippines. (shrink)

Romantic lovers notoriously overestimate the physical attractiveness of their own partners. This phenomenon is typically described as a kind of delusion or 'madness', and ascribed to the irrationality of love. I argue, on the contrary, that it does not involve distortion, error, or irrationality, but rather is an intelligible result of the particular kind of relationship that romantic love involves. In my explanation, I emphasize the critical role of the imagination in lovers' perception of beauty.

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 112 Heft: 1 Seiten: 256-260.