This book, collecting his most important papers in the form in which they were originally published, can be seen as a companion to that one.

Although general equilibrium theory originated in the late nineteenth century, modern elaboration and development of the theory began only in the 1930s and 1940s. This book focuses on the version of the theory developed in the second half of the twentieth century, referred to by Lionel McKenzie as the classical general equilibrium theory. McKenzie offers detailed and rigorous treatment of the classical model, giving step-by-step proofs of the basic theorems. In many cases he elaborates on the individual steps to (...) give a fuller understanding of the underlying principles. His goal is to provide readers with a true mastery of the methodology so that they can derive new results that will further enrich their thinking about general equilibrium theory. Special attention is given to the McKenzie model, in which it is not assumed that the number of firms is given but rather that technologies or activities are available to any agents who can supply the resources they require. The McKenzie model is used to establish the turnpike theorems of optimal and competitive capital accumulation. (shrink)

Although it is generally acknowledged that the coming of age of analytical philosophy of history as a flourishing enterprise in contemporary philosophical circles is due chiefly to the pioneering work of R.G. Collingwood, what Collingwood had to say about history in particular and the scientific study of it has sometimes been obscured by a concern with larger questions, such as whether Collingwood’s writings can be viewed as a single system or as successive but ultimately incompatible attempts at elaborating such a (...) system, whether and to what extent he was an old-fashioned idealist, and whether his thought did or did not undergo a radical conversion from idealism to historicism. In History as Re-Enactment, W. H. Dray attempts to re-examine Collingwood’s philosophy of history with a view to clarifying precisely what his contribution to this field amounts to, and where it fits in Collingwood’s lifelong attempt to achieve a rapprochement between philosophy and history. (shrink)

The essays collected together in this volume originated with a symposium which addressed a variety of issues associated with the publications of Professor W.H. Dray in the philosophy of history. In this expanded version of the original symposium, to which Professor Dray has provided a critical response, a group of prominent philosophers and historians address the central questions posed by contemporary philosophy of history - such as, the logic and methodology of historical explanation, the selection and uses of evidence, the (...) fact/value relationship, the nature of historical causation, the question of conflicting interpretations and their possible resolution, the idea of history as a school of practical wisdom, and the question whether history has any discernable pattern or meaning. These issues are approached from the experience of both historians and philosophers and represent an important increment to the long-standing and continuing debates concerning the nature and aims of the practice and philosophy of history. (shrink)

Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida—that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader—would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (...) criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it. · 1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique , pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard .· 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination , p. 297. Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. (shrink)

Rood’s intention is two-fold: to expose the strategic intention and design of the Soviet Union, and to show how "the dangerous inclination democratic peoples have of discounting the likelihood of war" has rendered the West blind to the danger posed by Soviet strategy. The first part of the book chronicles the at first clandestine and then, under Hitler, public rearmament of Germany in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In support of Churchill’s claim that the Second World War was (...) an unnecessary war, Rood shows, through contemporaneous documentation, the surprising extent to which German political and military activities between the wars were known to the British government. The great failure of British leadership in that period was therefore not one of intelligence; the facts were available. Rather, it was one of interpretation, a failure to see German activity for what it was—preparation for war. (shrink)

Influential neoclassical economist Lionel McKenzie has made major contributions to postwar economic thought in the fields of equilibrium, trade, and capital accumulation. This selection of his papers traces the development of his thinking in these three crucial areas.McKenzie's early academic life took him to Duke, Princeton, Oxford, the University of Chicago, and the Cowles Commission. In 1957, he went to the University of Rochester to head the economics department there, and he remains at Rochester, now Wilson Professor Emeritus of (...) Economics. McKenzie's most significant research was undertaken during a period that saw the development of the major themes of neoclassical economics and the use of fundamental mathematical methods to do so. McKenzie contributed to both aspects of this research program. He helped shape the direction of the field and, at Rochester, influenced generations of future scholars. In 2002, The MIT Press published McKenzie's Classical General Equilibrium Theory, a detailed summary of the model and methodology. This book, collecting his most important papers in the form in which they were originally published, can be seen as a companion to that one. The many state-of-the-art results achieved in McKenzie's original papers present sophisticated theoretical work that will continue to be important to future developments in the discipline. (shrink)

Two currently much discussed views about truth, truth pluralism and truth relativism, are found in Sellars’s writings. I show that his motivations for adoping these views are interestingly different from those shared by most of their recent advocates. First, I explain how Sellars comes to embrace a version of truth pluralism. I argue that his version overcomes a difficulty confronting pluralists, albeit at a serious cost. Then I argue that Sellars’s truth pluralism isn’t motivated by his interest in domains of (...) discourse beyond the “matter-of-factual.” Rather, the key to his truth pluralism, his analysis of truth as “semantical assertibility,” is motivated by the same consideration that leads him to adopt truth relativism. This is his interest in applying semantic notions to discourse that embodies conceptual structures other than ours. Despite their common motivation, I conclude that Sellars’s relativism is independent of, and indeed stands in tension with, the analysis of truth that underlies his pluralism. (shrink)

Based on specific documentary evidence, historian Lionel Jensen reveals how 16th- and 17th-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient RU ...

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

Adaptive phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental variability, and yet, despite its adaptive significance, phenotypic plasticity is neither ubiquitous nor infinite. In this review, we merge developmental and population genetic perspectives to explore costs and limits on the evolution of plasticity. Specifically, we focus on the role of modularity in developmental genetic networks as a mechanism underlying phenotypic plasticity, and apply to it lessons learned from population genetic theory on the interplay between relaxed selection and mutation accumulation. We (...) argue that the environmental specificity of gene expression and the associated reduction in pleiotropic constraints drive a fundamental tradeoff between the range of plasticity that can be accommodated and mutation accumulation in alternative developmental networks. This tradeoff has broad implications for understanding the origin and maintenance of plasticity and may contribute to a better understanding of the role of plasticity in the origin, diversification, and loss of phenotypic diversity. (shrink)

Surveys Western literature and thought to reveal the evolution of the ideals of sincerity and authenticity.

This important collection of essays includes Professor Hart's first defense of legal positivism; his discussion of the distinctive teaching of American and Scandinavian jurisprudence; an examination of theories of basic human rights and the notion of "social solidarity," and essays on Jhering, Kelsen, Holmes, and Lon Fuller.

Laborie and Hessayon bring rare prophetic and millenarian texts to an international audience by presenting sources from all over Europe (broadly defined), and across the early modern period in English for the first time.

Through clear explanation of its characteristic concepts and doctrines, and paying close attention to the published works of its philosophers, the volume ...

Building on recent work, I present sequent systems for the non-classical logics LP, K3, and FDE with two main virtues. First, derivations closely resemble those in standard Gentzen-style systems. Second, the systems can be obtained by reformulating a classical system using nonstandard sequent structure and simply removing certain structural rules (relatives of exchange and contraction). I clarify two senses in which these logics count as “substructural.”.

ABSTRACT:‘Race’ has long searched for a stable, suitable idea, with no consensus on a master meaning in sight. What I call deflationary pluralism about the existence of race recognizes that various meanings may be true as far as they go but avoids murky disputes over whether there are races in some sense. Once we have rejected the notion that racial essences yield innate cognitive differences, there is little point to arguing over the race idea. In its place, I propose the (...) idea of socioancestry, which jettisons racial thinking yet recognizes the social dynamics of color. For example, Black Americans, many of whom have traceable non-African ancestry, constitute an Africa-identified, socioancestrally black subgroup. ‘Race’ talk is not needed to sustain legitimate color-conscious approaches to social identity and social justice. Long-standing fixation on the race idea has obscured the simple truth that visible continental ancestry is the root of the social reality of color consciousness. (shrink)

Development of the shapes of living organisms and their parts is a field of science in which there are no generally accepted theoretical principles. What form these principles are likely to take, when they emerge, is a subject in which there is a wide gulf of disagreement between physical scientists and experimental biologists. This book contains both an extensive philosophical commentary on this dichotomy in views and an exposition of the type of theory most favoured by physical scientists. In this (...) theory living form is a manifestation of the dynamics of chemical change and physical transport or other physics of spatial communication. The reaction-diffusion theory, as initiated by Turing in 1952 and since elaborated by Prigogine and by Gierer and Meinhardt among others, is discussed in detail at a level that requires a good knowledge of a first course in calculus, but no more than that. The great growth of molecular biology has tended to overshadow the increase in our understanding of the nature of these kinetic processes. This book seeks to reawaken interest in dynamics in the hope that a better balance between the importance of things and the importance of actions may emerge in the biology of the 21st century. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth seek to undermine debates about the nature of truth by arguing that the truth predicate is merely a device that allows us to express a certain kind of generality. I argue that a parallel approach is available in the case of logical consequence. Just as deflationism about truth offers an alternative to accounts of truth's nature in terms of correspondence or justification, deflationism about consequence promises an alternative to model-theoretic or proof-theoretic accounts of consequence's nature. I then (...) argue, against considerations put forward by Field and Beall, that Curry's paradox no more rules out deflationism about consequence than the liar paradox rules out deflationism about truth. (shrink)

The revisionary approach to semantic paradox is commonly thought to have a somewhat uncomfortable corollary, viz. that, on pain of triviality, we cannot affirm that all valid arguments preserve truth (Beall2007, Beall2009, Field2008, Field2009). We show that the standard arguments for this conclusion all break down once (i) the structural rule of contraction is restricted and (ii) how the premises can be aggregated---so that they can be said to jointly entail a given conclusion---is appropriately understood. In addition, we briefly rehearse (...) some reasons for restricting structural contraction. (shrink)

According to commitment accounts of assertion, asserting is committing oneself to something’s being the case, where such commitment is understood in terms of norms governing a social practice. I elaborate and compare two version of such accounts, liability accounts (associated with C.S. Peirce) and dialectical norm accounts (associated with Robert Brandom), concluding that the latter are more defensible. I argue that both versions of commitment account possess a potential advantage over rival normative accounts of assertion in that they needn’t presuppose (...) any notion of an assertion’s correctness. Additionally, I show how dialectical norm accounts can explain relations between assertion and truth. After setting forth objections that have been raised against commitment accounts, I argue that responses are available on behalf of dialectical norm accounts. Finally, I propose that a liberalized dialectical norm account can illuminate phenomena sometimes seen as supporting truth relativism. (shrink)

Matching bias in conditional reasoning consists of a tendency to select as relevant cases whose lexical content matches that referred to in the conditional statement, regardless of the presence of negatives. Evans demonstrated that use of explicit rather than implicit negative cases markedly reduced the matching bias effect on the conditional truth table task. In apparent contrast, recent studies of explicit negation on the Wason selection task have failed to find evidence of logical facilitation. Experiment 1 of the present study (...) strongly replicated the Evans findings and extended them to three forms of conditional statement. Experiments 2 and 3 showed further that the use of explicit negatives removed completely the matching bias effect on the Wason selection task. However, consistent with other recent studies, this elimination of bias didnotlead to facilitation of correct responding. The findings are interpreted as providing evidence that matching bias reflects a linguistically cued relevance effect. (shrink)

Innocence is a notion that can prove controversial. Claims of innocence typically support not imposing burdens on the innocent when their conduct is relevantly unobjectionable. This paper examines innocence in the context of violent conflict between states or groups. Many thinkers about the morality of such violence want to establish a principle that would protect innocent civilians. Yet the common view in just war theory does not affirm the moral innocence of civilians. Similarly, the common view that soldiers have an (...) equal right to kill does not affirm their equal moral culpability. (shrink)