Tradition
American
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What did Milton Friedman actually argue in his 1970 essay on business and profit?
In every business-ethics discussion I've been in, someone quotes Friedman's line that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and everyone either nods or sneers. Usually it's summarised as "greed is good". I've now found the essay (in the…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Devadatta is fat but never eats by day: is Mīmāṃsā “postulation” just inference to the best explanation?
When I read about sources of knowledge comparatively, I like to point out that the European and Indian debates ask different questions. The European one asks which source does the real work, senses or reason. The Indian one asks how many irreducible…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
For years my study has been the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which are said to accompany…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara4 replies -
Novels give us moral knowledge that no argument can deliver
Every year in my classroom I watch the same thing happen. Students who have heard every argument about slavery, its cruelty, its injustice, its economics, read Toni Morrison's Beloved and come out changed in a way the arguments never managed. They don't…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Is “aesthetic experience” one kind of experience, or a label for several unlike things?
Twice last month I lost track of time completely. Once was a late-night proof that came together with a kind of click, everything suddenly fitting. The other was a recording of the Goldberg Variations on a long drive. Both felt, from the…
Started by Derek Hollis4 replies -
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist turned historian and philosopher of science. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that mature sciences work within paradigms,…
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W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois was an African American sociologist, historian, philosopher and activist, the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard,…
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Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell was an American philosopher who taught at the University of California, Berkeley and for most of his career at Harvard. Drawing on…
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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist who taught at Harvard and wrote widely read essays on natural history. With Niles…
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R. Edward Freeman
R. Edward Freeman is an American philosopher and management theorist, long based at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. His 1984 book…
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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian literary scholar and media theorist who taught at the University of Toronto. In The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media…
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Matthew Crawford
Matthew Crawford is an American writer and philosopher, with a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, who has been a fellow…
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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago and received the Nobel memorial prize in…
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Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who spent his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded cybernetics, the study of control and…
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John Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist who taught at Princeton and later at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked with…
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Langdon Winner
Langdon Winner is an American political theorist of technology who has taught for many years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In…
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Hayden White
Hayden White was an American historian and theorist of history who taught at Wayne State, Rochester, UCLA, the University of California at Santa Cruz…
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Helen Nissenbaum
Helen Nissenbaum is a philosopher of information technology who has taught at Princeton, New York University and Cornell Tech in New York. She developed…
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Hugh Everett III
Hugh Everett III was an American physicist who, as a doctoral student of John Wheeler at Princeton, proposed the relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics…
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Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1838 and became the most prominent African American abolitionist, orator, editor and writer of…
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Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth Loftus is an American cognitive psychologist who worked at the University of Washington and later the University of California, Irvine. Her experiments on…
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Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-born anthropologist who settled in the United States and built the anthropology department at Columbia University in New York. Through…
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Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan is an American psychologist who taught at Harvard and later at New York University. In a Different Voice challenged Lawrence Kohlberg's stage…
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Claude Shannon
Claude Shannon was an American mathematician and engineer who worked at Bell Labs and later MIT. His 1948 paper 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication'…
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Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist who did fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco and spent much of his career at the Institute for Advanced…
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David Bohm
David Bohm was an American-born theoretical physicist who studied at Berkeley and taught at Princeton before leaving the United States in the McCarthy era;…
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Don Ihde
Don Ihde was an American philosopher who taught for most of his career at Stony Brook University. Building on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he…