These two volumes are the successor to The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by A.H. Armstrong, which appeared in 1967. The difference in titles reflects a fundamental difference in outlook. Armstrong treated this era as an interim period between classical Greek philosophy and the philosophy of the Middle Ages, each of which had its own unity and coherence. The present volume conceives of late ancient philosophy as a field in itself, having its own unity and coherence.

The terminus a quo for this history is roughly 200 CE, or just before the birth of Plotinus.

Charitable or withering? (See here for supporting evidence.)

The secret of the MacGuffin is that revealing its name only further heightens the suspense about its identity in each situation. This in turn challenges the master to give visual presence to something whose logic is hidden. In other words: something without meaning for the story receives the distinction of optical significance….

In the MacGuffin, distinguished only by its identity, a secret is condensed that justified every expense, every activity, any amount of life, for the suspense of the action. A man is the carrier of material, of a formula, of a sketch, of information that is supposedly terribly important; but it is not important that his secret be revealed in the end – it is not even permissible, if disappointment is to be avoided over the absurdity of letting this thing be a matter of life and death.

It is best that the possessor of the secret goes under with it. The MacGuffin is an unfathomable dimension that determines the suspense of the action. Hitchcock can also convey this without his story, through his experience with the production of suspense: “the main thing I’ve learned over the years is that the MacGuffin is nothing. I’m convinced of this, but I find i very difficult to prove it to others. My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean my emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in ‘North by Northwest.’” In that 1959 spy film, the all-encompassing question of what the spies are seeking begins with the declaration that it is the object of trade of an imaginary import-export agency. The spectator learns nothing more than that it consists of “government secrets.” “Here, you see,” Hitchcock concludes, “the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing.” Thus it can come to the identity of Being and Nothing. One realizes that philosophers had and must have their MacGuffins in order to preserve the work of thinking, as well as interest in its result.

The legendary second part of Being and Time was never written, because it dared not be written. Anyone who has ever let himself be influenced by the preparations for the expedition into the center of Being as it is understood by Dasein, shudders before the banality of that which could be brought to light at the end of all existential analyses and in the middle of the enchanting “horizon of time” circle.

The author of what is still the most significant philosophical work of this century must have realized that he risked all significance if he did not decide to let it remain a fragment. To do that, it was of course necessary to attribute the breaking off of the fundamental-ontological expedition to the compulsion of higher powers. They demanded with overpowering urgency that he do something else: surrender himself to the fate of thinking.

Companions were quickly found in antiquity. Tradition had turned them into a fragment that alone still darkly transmitted an intuition of origin. So the pre-Socratics, Parmenides and Heraclitus in particular, became obligatory hermeneutic companions; they shared the fate of thought broken off from its ambitious aims.

The MacGuffin of Being did its duty. The effect did not fail – the public followed breathlessly. A few who have not heard anything about the MacGuffin are still spun around by it.

Is this game forbidden? Hardly. The disappearance of MacGuffins from the world would bring its movement to a standstill. The means justify the end; the secrets revealed along the way justify the unrevealed remainder. The answer never given to the question of the meaning of Being induced the effort to question human Dasein about the unity of its statements and behavior. On the way there was a delay, and delay proved itself to be the meaning of the way.

Curiosity is the disturbance of boredom. The MacGuffin is its epiphany.

Hans Blumenberg, Being as MacGuffin: How to Preserve the Desire to Think

The MacGuffin: the promises of transcendence, secret knowledge, a final purpose, total harmony.

Related posts:Hans Blumenberg on Heidegger, Freud, and Others
Hans Blumenberg: Former Reflections Enduring Doubt
Hans Blumenberg: Work on Myth, ch. 1
Hans Blumenberg and His Myth Science Arkestra
Hans Blumenberg’s Dichotomies

The Israeli kibbutzim are surprisingly successful examples of voluntary socialism. Even today about 2% of the Israeli population lives on a kibbutz and they account for a significant share of output; about 4% overall (using data from 2004 from here and here) and much higher in some industries such as agriculture where the kibbutzim account for some 40% of Israeli output.

Nevertheless, the kibbutzim aren’t growing and, under economic and social pressure, many are privatizing in various ways. Most notably, beginning in 1998 many kibbutzim lowered the marginal tax rate from 100% (!) to about the same level as in the rest of Israel, 20-50%. The reduction in taxes meant that for the first time there were large wage differences for members of a kibbutz and, most importantly, there were large potential wage differences for those who increased their productivity.

In How Responsive is Investment in Schooling to Changes in Redistribution Policies and in Returns (free here) Ran Abramitzky and Victor Lavy look at the acquisition of human capital for high school students living on kibbutzim before and after the reduction in taxes (using a dif and dif strategy on early and late adopters). The authors find (from an NBER summary):

…The effects of the reforms were relatively small for students from highly educated families, in contrast to relatively large effects for students from families with lower parental education who had been covered by the pay reform for all of their years in high school. This group’s high school completion rates increased by 4.4 percent, their mean exam score went up by 8.3 points, their qualification rate for the Bagrut diploma increased by 19.6 percent, and the fraction of students with university qualifying scores increased by 16.8 percent….boys were most strongly influenced by the change.

The pay reform produced larger increases in educational outcomes than monetary bonuses for Bagrut diploma qualifying scores, a school choice program that allowed students to choose their high school in seventh grade, or a teacher bonus program that paid teachers of math, English, and Hebrew bonuses when their students did well on the Bagrut.

The authors argue that there are general lessons to be learnt:

Our findings have important implications beyond the Israeli context. First, they shed light on the educational responses that could result from a decrease in the income tax rate, thus are informative on the long-run labor supply responses to tax changes. Second, they shed light on the educational responses expected when the return to education increases. For example, such changes might be occurring in many countries as technology-oriented growth increases the return to skills.

I am less confident that the numerical results can be generalized, although of course the general point that incentives matter is well-taken.

The results, however, raise another issue. The original kibbutz were inspired by a combination of Marxism, socialism and Zionism. In the capitalist kibbutz, there is an opportunity for a new principle. Taxes can be set not according to Marx but according to Rawls and his second principle of justice: inequalities are to be allowed so long as they benefit  the least-advantaged members of the society/kibbutz.

Thus, it would be interesting to know if any of the kibbutz have tried to adjust taxes so as to implement a Rawlsian approach to inequality (if not, perhaps Israeli taxes are already above Rawlsian levels.)

Benny Shanon is an Israeli cognitive psychologist who has taken the psychoactive hallucinogen ayahuasca well over one hundred times. His book The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience is a scholarly attempt to describe its effects both through a survey of participants and through descriptions of his own extensive experiences.

The book is a mine of information about how the mind processes information, sense data, and concepts under abnormal conditions. Shanon does not disguise his enthusiasm for ayahuasca, but he attempts to maintain a disinterested and naturalistic stance. (Psychiatrist Charles Grob talks more about the specific neurological effects of DMT, ayahuasca’s active ingredient, in this interview.)

I have not taken ayahuasca. It does not sound terribly appealing. The one extensive description of an ayahuasca experience I’d previously read was by Kira Salak, who claimed that it cured her lifelong suicidal depression overnight. Her description of the experience, however, is enough to scare you off the stuff for life.

Shanon, however, comes off as a remarkably equanimous guy of good humor and patience, so his accounts do not dwell so much on the dark side of ayahuasca. (He attributes much of his poise to ayahuasca, but I suspect he was fairly upbeat and fearless going in.) We are 60 pages in before we come to this blithe passage:

Usually, the harshest symptoms of the Ayahuasca inebriation occur during the first 90 minutes following the onset of the effect. During this time, visions can be very strong and the entire experience may be tough and even frightening. Often the feeling is that the drinker has little or no control over what is happening. Thus, the initial phase of the inebriation is likely to present drinkers with moments of intense struggle. At times, the person who partakes of Ayahuasca feels he or she is losing his or her senses and even going mad. Quite commonly, people feel that they are about to die. Furthermore, it often seems that what is happening is irreversible and that one will never return to one’s normal self. With this, thoughts like ‘Why, for heaven’s sake, did I make the mistake of partaking of this drink?’ often cross drinkers’ minds. Naturally, all this is likely to generate great trepidation. With experience, however, the fear can be better managed and the Ayahuasca drinker learns to gain more control over the intoxication.

Fortunately, Shanon’s enviable nonchalance allowed him to continue chronicling ayahuasca’s effects despite the occasional remarks that ayahuasca frequently produces experiences I would consider horrifying and unbearable. Most of the visions he describes are generally rather benevolent, possibly because people who have repeatedly horrific ones stop drinking ayahuasca rather quickly. Grob, who also seems rather enthusiastic about ayahuasca’s possibilities, still remarks, “It can be an eternity in a Hell-realm.”

I will quote and comment on passages that struck me as particularly interesting philosophically. A good chunk of the experiences fall in line with what’s expected from corrupted sensory modalities: distorted vision, time-dilation, dream-like visions, etc. The exceptions, however, are fascinating, and Shanon’s dutiful chronicling makes the material worthwhile.

Shanon divides the material by subject matter and thematic analysis. I’ve sorted the excerpts into my own set of broad categories.

 

Confusion of the Sensuous and the Conceptual

Many of the hallucinations involve confusions of the (supposed) duality of concept and sense data, and make more intuitive sense if thought of as conceptual manipulation rather than raw internal experience, whatever that may be, as in these two examples:

In still another Daime session the madrinha stepped aside and a man passed a vessel of incense back and forth in front of her. The smoke lifted up and it became perfectly clear to me: It was an act of cleansing, of protecting the woman from potential dangers that may be inflicted by evil spirits. There were no visual hallucinations as such, yet, I would not say that the act was merely symbolic. What I experienced was literally this—seeing the casting of a shield against evil powers. It all seemed to have a very serious and sombre allure, and manifestly, it was all invested with magic. If I were to define what made it all so mysterious I would say that it was the fact that on the one hand everything pertained to another reality, while yet at the very same time it was all real. Again, no hallucination as such was experienced—technically what I was seeing was real, and none the less it was all utterly non-ordinary, and enchanted.

Another pattern of interpreting-as is one I shall characterize as seeing the particular as generic, or rather, seeing the generic in the particular. I have experi­ enced this on a number of occasions. The first, which for me was very striking, occurred during the daytime. It was in a village and I, intoxicated, was sitting on a small verandah overlooking the meadows. A farmer (a real one) was passing by, and I saw The Farmer, the universal prototype of all farmers. Again, as in the previous example, the standard perception and the non-ordinary one are related. After all, I saw The Farmer, not The Fisherman or The King. Yet, while normally I would have seen just a farmer, this time I saw The Farmer. While semantically linked, experientially these two perceptions are totally different. I have heard accounts of the very same phenomenon from my informants.

In both these cases, ordinary sense data is framed by conceptual interpretation that ordinarily kicks in only at a layer of remove from seemingly immanent experience, revealing that conceptual interpretation was there all along.

Similarly, invocation of Platonic forms occurs repeatedly:

The real figure (the trees) and the visualized one (the people) were related, but not by means of any overlapping of lines. In other words, the relationship was primarily semantic. Other instances of this kind I have experienced were seeing an (imaginary) jaguar resting on the branch of a (real) tree and an (imaginary) cow standing on a (real) truck.

Abstract entities may be seen as well. One informant told me he had a grand vision of perfect geometric bodies. Another reported a scene in which he spontan­eously came to the appreciation that the physical world is harmoniously governed by mathematical laws. Three informants reported grand visions in which the manifold of all forms was seen. Several informants, all with an academic education, explicitly commented that Ayahuasca brought them to the world of Platonic Ideas.

Finally, there are visions in which one feels one is encountering the Supreme Good. A major impression these visions had on me is the (Platonic) conclusion that ultimately, the ethical and the aesthetical as well as the true are the same. I have heard similar assessments made by many other people.

A better way to read these perceptions of universals is to interpret them as the conceptual being applied and/or interpreted at a different level than usual. Even in the perception of a particular instance of an abstract concept, we already have the abstract concept in mind. We just don’t believe ourselves to perceive it.

To put it another way: does Shanon have an experience of seeing The Farmer, or does he merely think that he has had an experience of seeing The Farmer? This is a nonsensical question: there is no difference between the two.

The meaninglessness of this question, I believe, points to the effect that ayahuasca is having on him. There is not some raw layer of true/veridical empirical perception that is then getting corrupted by a process of cognition. Classically Cartesian and empiricist accounts are misleading in this regard. The conceptual objects of perception (what I think of as Husserl’s noemata) are themselves corrupted.

Shanon pretty much agrees on this point:

Should we say that what is seen in Ayahuasca visions is to be divided into two: that which is ‘really’ seen, and that which is the product of interpretation? While there might be instances where interpretation may be relegated to a separate, secondary process, I am reluctant to regard this as the paradigmatic, general case. Because of my previous work in both psychology and semantics, I have difficulty accepting the two-stage analysis dividing perception and interpret­ation. My general theoretical stance in cognition is that there is no demarcation line between ‘raw’ perception, on the one hand, and semantic, meaningful interpret­ation, on the other hand. Following the philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1962) and the psychologist Gibson (1979), I believe that it is impossible to draw a clear-cut line dividing between naked, interpretation-free sensory inputs and interpretative processes that are subsequently applied to them so as to render these inputs into meaningful percepts. In the spirit of Heidegger (1962), I maintain that cognition is always ‘laden with meaning’. Applied to the example cited, this view implies that, from a cognitive-psychological point of view, if the figure seen was identified as being Jesus, then phenomenologically this is indeed who was seen.

Does this deflate the claims that Shanon is making of profound, sublime experience? As long as we maintain that any thought has some phenomenological content, it doesn’t have to. That said, prefacing every ayahuasca experience with “I thought [I saw Jesus, e.g.]” certainly makes things sound less impressive. If I were to take ayahuasca and have an experience in which I knew that 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5, I can’t say that would seem very remarkable in retrospect.

Likewise, Shanon repeatedly has experiences in which he does not hallucinate per se so much as undergo experience that is perceptually impossible by ordinary standards, dealing with the cr[…]

Derek Parfit is one of my favorite philosophers, and favorite writers at that, so for many years I have been looking forward to his next book, which is now out.  The main argument is that rule consequentialism, properly understood Kantianism, and contractualism all can be understood as a broadly consistent moral theory, all climbing up the same mountain from different sides.

The text is recognizably Parfit, but I am not convinced by its major arguments, and I also believe the Parfitian method — any reader of him will understand this reference — does not succeed in all of the new areas under consideration.

The philosophical patron saints of the book are Kant and Sidgwick, and I would suggest also Bloomsbury.  Parfit is an extreme rationalist and he thinks (hopes?) we can find, and agree upon, the right answers to moral questions.  (At the same time he deeply fears that we cannot, and he is a philosophic conservative as Keynes was.)  What’s missing is Hume, not the Hume of is-ought worries but the Hume who came to terms with the tensions between the arguments of philosophy and the experience of everyday human life.

My favorite features of the Parfit book include the early comparison of Kant and Sidgwick and the general concern with the frequency and intensity of moral disagreement.

Parfit at great length discusses optimific principles, namely which specifications of rule consequentialism and Kantian obligations can succeed, given strategic behavior, collective action problems, non-linearities, and other tricks of the trade.  The Kantian might feel that the turf is already making too many concessions to the consequentialists, but my concern differs.  I am frustrated with this very long and very central part of the book, which cries out for formalization or at the very least citations to formalized game theory.

If you’re analyzing a claim such as — “It is wrong to act in some way unless everyone could rationally will it to be true that everyone believes such acts to be morally permitted” (p.20)  — words cannot bring you very far, and I write this as a not-very-mathematically-formal economist.

Parfit is operating in the territory of solution concepts and game-theoretic equilibrium refinements, but with nary a nod in their direction.  By the end of his lengthy and indeed exhausting discussions, I do not feel I am up to where game theory was in 1990.

I read the standard game-theoretic results as implying that ethics is a far more indeterminate enterprise than Parfit might like to see.  Any particular specification of rule consequentialism tends to require increasingly baroque refinements to cover all the different possible kinds of situations.  At the end we’re not left with much in the way of a rule at all, other than a general injunction to tell people to do something good and then to rejigger the rule itself, or complicate it with more contingencies, to cover the required ground.

To pose a simple example: “maximize your marginal impact” won’t as an injunction address a lot of environmental problems.  “Maximize your average impact” fails in cases where you are truly decisive.  What might other more complex rules be, and what are the expectations those rules are making about the behavior of others, what you infer from their behavior, what they infer from your inference, and so on.  The path out of these boxes takes us very far away from a rules concept that say Sidgwick might have found intuitive.

Hume has been locked out of the room and he is not allowed to re-enter in the form of Parfit having a dialogue with Cho and Kreps.

Now maybe, just maybe, that game-theoretic messiness does not have to be fatal for rule-consequentialism.  Still, I propose a rewrite.  Cut or severely limit the hundreds of pages on this topic, start with what game theory already is showing, describe that mess in philosophic, conceptual terms, and then consider whether that mess is compatible with the analogous messes found in Kantianism and contractualism,  Maybe it can be shown that they are (broadly) the same mess.  Nonetheless, such a collection of messes may be surrounding the same mountain but they will not scale it and Parfit would have to gaze once again into the abyss of, what is to him, ethical nihilism.  (Cut back to David Hume for a different attitude.  Perhaps Parfit’s very strong philosophic and personal desire to succeed and solve the whole problem draws him from the path that will get us up the mountain some small degree.)

For these reasons I see the biggest and most central part of the book as a failure, possibly wrong but more worryingly “not even wrong” and simply missing the questions defined by where the frontier — choice theory and not just philosophic ethics — has been for some time.

On other points, the criticisms of subjective and desire-based theories are good, but I view Parfit’s conclusions as already having been established.

The talk of Kantian dignity, and of “treating people as a mere means” I do not think can be well-defined.  I kept on wanting to see the Marginal Revolution (the real one, the 1871 one) inform this discussion.

I very much agree with Parfit’s argument that no one — not even evil people — should deserve to suffer.  I also agree with Parfit’s notion of the irreducibly normative.

Until the material on consequentialism is nailed, I don’t think the integration with contractualism can work.

I would describe the Parfitian method as “the postulation of bold, minimalist claims, explored by the use of brilliant hypotheticals and counterexamples.”  In Reasons and Persons the Parfitian method works because the potential for philosophic vagueness is limited by the vividness of the counterfactual (or real world) examples.  Most readers of that book are still thinking about split brains, the Repugnant Conclusion, and Future Tuesday Indifference, among numerous other examples.  You could question whether all of the terms were pinned down rigorously, but you still knew that the thought experiment was making you rethink some of your priors.  In the subject areas of On What Matters the semantics are too slack, too open to multiple interpretation, and too many of the central concepts cry out for formalization.  There are not compelling new metaphors and examples to pin down the discourse.  Parfit’s greatest strength is as an imaginer, often outside of traditional philosophic dimensions, and yet here he is so concerned with justifying his disagreements with his peers and colleagues.  Their ghosts and comments and discourses are shackling him, and if you visit the best pages of Reasons and Persons you will see they hardly mention the names of other philosophers at all, much less current philosophers.

I do not wish to put you off Parfit.  He is a philosopher of major importance and, non-trivially, one of the most philosophical philosophers, perhaps ever.  He lives, thinks, feels, breathes, and exudes philosophy in a way which is, in and of itself, a major contribution to human thought and being.  Reading him is an unforgettable and illuminating experience.  His best arguments have great real world import.

It is stunning to read the last three pages of the preface, which list everybody who gave him comments.  It’s a long list, but I’m not sure it was the right list to have chosen.

Addendum: Here is Peter Singer’s review.  Here is a review from Constantine Sandis.

First, let me jot some thoughts about Ingrid’s peer-review post that also relate to Henry’s. Then, mongooses.

The main virtue of the peer-review system is that it’s basically uncorrupt. It’s main vice: it’s weakly accountable and, as a result, intermittently neglectful. Reviewers can’t illegitimately profit from the review process because they can’t profit from it, period. Except in the abstract sense that it’s nice to be part of a healthy field, and to feel the feeling of doing one’s duty. It seems to me there is a simple fix. Publish referee reports with the journal articles themselves. (If that takes too much paper, make the referee reports a standard e-option, at least.) Give referees the option of de-anonymizing themselves, to stand behind their words. If they prefer, they can preserve their anonymity, although their critical verdicts become public. You still hide the author’s name from the refs during the review process. (Obviously referees should also have sensible options for editing reports in light of the final product. You wouldn’t want to publish a blisteringly negative referee report, demanding fixes for problems that were, indeed, fixed in response to that very blistering report.)

Disadvantages: none. No, really. None. No increase in corruption. (Extra paper costs. So make it e-only.)

Advantages: many.

Reviewer who unmasks gets a minor publication, small line on the ol’ CV. This would need to become an acceptable, minor publication form before you could count it, of course, but no time like the present for establishing a healthy new norm. (A solid referee’s report ought to be worth the same as a ‘reply to’ or short critical note.) Being a ‘power referee’ could become a viable professional option. With academics pushed to publish, as things stand, this could balance things out. Get the pipes unclogged.

Reviewer who doesn’t unmask, perhaps because she is worried she is savaging a potentially powerful person in the field, at least gets the satisfaction of having her critique on the record. (If you feel that there are powerful people/influential views in need of getting taken down a peg, you will be in favor of this being done publicly. It would make the process of writing the referee report more satisfactory, if you expected to go this route.)

Reviewer gets first crack. If you labor to lay out a strong objection to a published piece, it’s sort of annoying if, then, someone else is first to publish the objection you already worked out in your referee report.

Reviewer will take the time to write clearly, cogently and considerately, rather than grumpily backhanding a thing she doesn’t like. Because her good name is attached. (I think referees would up their writing game even if they intended to stay anonymous, just knowing their words would be published.)

Transparency of social network is a benefit. It’s interesting to be able to see who agrees and disagrees with whom, about what. Blind peer review mostly aims at preventing self-dealing, cocooning and cronyism. But the enemy relation is just as potentially pernicious as the friend relation, and blind review gives wide scope for unaccountable expressions of intellectual hostility. In a more positive sense, the highest quality signals are given off by friends disagreeing with friends and enemies agreeing with enemies. It would be interesting, then, to know when you face such likely high-quality cases.

Brief referee reports would function like abstracts, which are nice to have. Brief, negative reports would be contrarian abstracts – a genre no one writes about their own work, so it’s a damn shame so many instances are not part of the public record. In general, it can only be helpful to have the option of availing oneself of some ready-made critical frames.

You could publish a wider variety of types of academic ‘results’. This brings us to Henry’s post about Kanazawa. Let me re-quote the editorial apologetics Henry quotes: “I happen to think it is a great thought provoking document, and one of the few in the last ten years that have actually gotten people to talk about issues. … I would rather have an article that causes people to think and talk and yes, argue and criticize than to publish an article that is one more facet of the same old thing.” This is not a deplorable sentiment, in the general scheme of things. But there is a serious problem with publishing work that aspires to qualify under the ‘get people to talk’ standard in the self-same sober-sided manner that you publish stuff that isn’t wild, speculative, bold, blue-sky provocation; that purports to establish results. If you published a piece along with a referee report that says ‘this is not just wrong but irresponsible and, frankly, plain nuts’ and a referee report that says ‘this is wild stuff, but worth talking about’ then you have more truth in advertising. The author of the piece in question will have a slightly harder time pointing to a publication refereed in such a manner as evidence of a ‘solid result’. If the issue really is worth talking about, then the talk can proceed. (There is an ambiguity in our attitudes toward academic ‘results’ hereabouts. On the one hand, we think you should only publish if it’s really solid. On the other hand, we think anything apparently solid could turn out not to be, and probably will, to some degree, at some point. Even solid results are conversation starters, rather than stoppers. But that’s not to say you should consciously set out to publish conversation starters – although you could. That could be a style of journal. Contributors could muse, publicly, in what they take to be a bold and provocative manner, about issues in the field, without pretending to nail anything down. Reviewers could be asked to judge contributions according to this rather vague metric.)

This isn’t a fix for the Kanazawa case. I have no personal opinion about that, above and beyond the distinct, second-hand impression I am coming away with that he is a very seriously bad actor. What I am suggesting wouldn’t make such a case any worse. And it might actually make it somewhat less bad. He seems to have submitted, been rejected, and then just re-submitted elsewhere until he eventually got let in through neglect or editorially non-explicit application of some ‘hey, it’ll stir the pot’ principle. Referees’ serious concerns about plain incompetence were not part of the publication record, and certainly weren’t permanently afixed to the pieces in question. If it’s going to be published eventually anyway, it might as well be tagged as being the kind of thing it probably is. (Obviously saying so is consistent with saying it shouldn’t be published at all.)

Now, mongooses. No lesser a personage than Nakul himself showed up in comments to recommend a mongoose at least as interesting as any jewel-spewing one. Namely, a half-golden one. Click link for truly first rate oh-SNAP! trash-talking from the mongoose in question: “’Ye kings, this great sacrifice is not equal to a prastha of powdered barley given away by a liberal Brahmana of Kurukshetra who was observing the Unccha vow.” If the mongoose were to execute the right sort of uh-uh-UH! side-to-side head movement, while throwing down in this exemplary fashion, truly the virtue of the ritual occasion would be unexceeded. (Also, it just goes to show. Damn liberals.)

Also, more than ever, we need a Kirby-cracklin splash page to honor the mongoose in question. A Hulk-style origin scene. “huge … explosion … of … virtue! Radiation of … goodness … battering my very being! I am becoming … HALF-GOLD!’ (Meanwhile, priests monitoring the scene can see it all. ‘My Vishnu! There was some sort of creature within the blast radius!’) Then the half-gold mongoose goes around, fighting crime, always looking for a ‘cure’. That is, something to turn the rest of him gold. Fighting criminals and demons that want to melt him or eat him.

There is an interesting philosophy of charity implicit in the tale in question. It make the valid point that a lot of ‘charitable giving’ is, basically, a consumption good, for what it’s worth. The mongoose’s philosophy is not consequentialist enough, not by half. But I think Matthew Yglesias would probably be willing to concede that, if some liberal were to give his very last prastha of powdered barley to the Harvard alumni fund, conditional on Harvard changing the name of its sports teams to the Half-Golden Mongooses – ye and verily, that they might, in every subsequent athletic match, serve as an object lesson in the nature of virtue – that this would be not just morally permissible but even an act of charity aimed at ‘social justice’. Even a consequentialist might concede as much.

(post tweaked for clarity, or perhaps just out of a shallow sense of my own cleverness)

David Hume, famous scolder of those who would derive “ought” from “is,” was born 300 years ago today. In point of fact Hume, while not enjoying the name recognition of Plato/Aristotle/Descartes/Kant, is certainly in the running for greatest philosopher of all time. He was a careful thinker, resistant to dogmatic answers, and a relatively sprightly writer as philosophers go. An empiricist who was as persuasive about the temptations of radical epistemological skepticism as anyone, but was still able to resist them. His tercentenary is well worth celebrating.

Dan Sperber, via Henry Farrell, suggests that we celebrate by posting quotes from Hume. When I first encountered him as a college freshman, it was in the context of a theology course where we were reading Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. I was intrigued when our professor pointed out a passage that seemed to prefigure Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which wasn’t going to appear until 82 years later. My dog-eared copy seems to have gone missing, but I found the quote at The Rough Guide to Evolution.

“And this very consideration too, continued PHILO, which we have stumbled on in the course of the argument, suggests a new hypothesis of cosmogony, that is not absolutely absurd and improbable. Is there a system, an order, an economy of things, by which matter can preserve that perpetual agitation which seems essential to it, and yet maintain a constancy in the forms which it produces? There certainly is such an economy; for this is actually the case with the present world. The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this economy or order; and by its very nature, that order, when once established, supports itself, for many ages, if not to eternity.

But wherever matter is so poised, arranged, and adjusted, as to continue in perpetual motion, and yet preserve a constancy in the forms, its situation must, of necessity, have all the same appearance of art and contrivance which we observe at present. All the parts of each form must have a relation to each other, and to the whole; and the whole itself must have a relation to the other parts of the universe; to the element in which the form subsists; to the materials with which it repairs its waste and decay; and to every other form which is hostile or friendly. A defect in any of these particulars destroys the form; and the matter of which it is composed is again set loose, and is thrown into irregular motions and fermentations, till it unite itself to some other regular form.”

To me now, it looks like something of a cross between Darwin — successful forms persevering among the chaos — and the Lucretius/Boltzmann scenario of the universe coming into existence through the random motion of atoms. (What makes Lucretius and Hume brilliant thinkers but Boltzmann and Darwin influential scientists is that the latter grappled closely with data, not just with ideas.)

The common thread among all these thinkers: trying to explain the origins of order in the absence of teleology. The fact that we can do that successfully in biology, and are hot on the trail in cosmology, is a milestone achievement in the history of human thought.

Adapt as necessary:

Created by Landon Schurtz. Hat tip: DavidAD and Leiter Reports.

This GUEST POST is written by Michael Clemens
This week, Professor Jonathan Wolff has warned the world that the United States “steals doctors from poorer countries” because it “simply does not train enough doctors to meet its voracious appetite for medical attention.” This is a strong accusation. Professor Wolff, a philosopher, should reconsider several dubious assumptions that his strong claim requires.
First, it is illegitimate to assume that it is possible for anyone to “steal” a human being. The very concept of such an act requires it to be possible for human beings to be owned by others. The notion that health workers may be owned—while presumably Professor Wolff would be offended if any person or group claimed ownership of him—is offensive. It is also illegal where Professor Wolff resides: the United Kingdom outlawed the ownership of people by other people in 1833. People, including health workers, who voluntarily leave their countries are not passive objects of others’ acts of “stealing”; they are active agents exercising a right guaranteed them by Article 13.2 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Second, it is incorrect to assume that the emigration of health workers from a poor country must cause a shortage of health workers at the origin. For decades, more nurses have left the Philippines to work abroad than leave any other country on earth. Yet in the Philippines today there are more Registered Nurses per capita than in the United Kingdom. This happened because so many Filipinos trained up as nurses to take advantage of opportunities abroad that this more than offset the departures. There is no such thing as a fixed stock of health workers in the world; they can be created, and wonderful career opportunities abroad are one of the forces that create them at home. The realities that shape the global health workforce are more complex than the simplistic picture that Professor Wolff paints.
Third, it is simply false for Professor Wolff to assert,
“If a doctor from Ghana is recruited to the US, not only does Ghana lose its doctor, it loses the money paid for the training. It may be that the doctor is likely to send a portion of earnings back home (known in the development business as ‘remittances’). But this is scant compensation.”
In fact, the average African-trained member of the American Medical Association left his or her country of training well over five years after earning the Medical Doctor degree—as I learned when I surveyed them. Thus an African country that has invested in the training of a typical emigrant doctor has already received several years of service from that doctor (without even accounting for care provided during medical school). So it is false to say that the investment in the training of those people is fully “lost”. Furthermore, African-trained members of the American Medical Association send home to Africa, on average, over $6,000 per year, even 20 years after arriving in the United States—including those who send no money. Far from being “scant compensation”, this means that the typical African-trained doctor coming to the United States has sent back much more than the cost of training another doctor in the country he or she came from.
Fourth, Professor Wolff’s argument requires the assumption that a proper policy goal of any country is that of zero immigration. Professor Wolff argues that the U.S. should train as many health workers as it needs. This, logically and inescapably, implies zero migration for health workers. (If every country did this, there logically could be no international movement of health workers as such—unless of course they gave up their professions and cleaned floors.) Zero migration of health workers means that the Ghanaian emigrant doctors Professor Wolff refers to must be forced to live in Ghana against their will—at a small fraction of the living standard of their colleagues in other countries, and of Professor Wolff’s living standard—or give up their profession to live elsewhere. “Self-sufficiency” in doctors at the destination would leave no other options for any of them. The ethical legitimacy of that state of affairs, and the consequent legitimacy of policies designed to bring it about, deserve more pondering than they have apparently received from philosophers. Taking actions that consign others to fates we would not accept for ourselves is something that we should do only with sad reluctance, based on great certainty and overwhelming evidence that directly harming health workers in this fashion will save lives. Professor Wolff has no such evidence.
Too much of the writing on health worker migration appears oblivious to the notion that health workers have agency or rights, and to the idea that the realization of health workers’ ambitions is an inherent good. I would expect philosophers to be the first concerned with such things, not the last. To anyone reading this post, I plead: If you ever say that health workers from poor countries are “stolen” or “poached”, please stop. That small change will mean that you begin to speak of them as human beings rather than owned property. Discussions of their movement must start from that premise, inside or outside our departments of philosophy.
In this paper I offer a non-technical summary of research on the above claims, and on related claims about the effects of skilled-worker migration on poor countries.

Following up on a conversation with a friend in Philosophy, I took a quick look at the Survey of Earned Doctorates to see the breakdown by gender for Ph.Ds awarded in the United States in 2009. Some nice pictures: Percent female by Division (with Philosophy picked out); Percent female for selected disciplines; and a giant percent female for (almost) all disciplines, with Philosophy picked out for emphasis. The links go to PDFs.

Matt Yglesias writes:

A lot of our politics is about symbolism. And symbolically intellectual property represents itself in the contemporary United States as a kind of property—it’s right there in the name. But it’s better thought of as a kind of regulation. Patents and copyrights are modeled, economically, the same as you would model any state-created monopoly.

I think the idea that intellectual property is property is too entrenched, at this point, for this to be an effective rhetorical strategy. Furthermore, rhetoric aside, philosophically the real breakthrough would be for people to realize that defending property rights is not tantamount to defending freedom. What strong IP protection generates is not a free market but something more like information feudalism: a market-unfriendly clusterfuck of fiefdoms and inescapably inefficient lord-vassal terms-of-service arrangements that any friend of freedom, in any ordinary sense, ought to look upon with disgust. The reason why libertarian rhetoric – defend property rights! – can underwrite feudalism, of all things, is that a certain sort of libertarianism, i.e. so-called propertarianism, really just plain is a form of feudalism. I’ve made the case at length.

I don’t see much hope of making a snappy rhetorical case that would break the unhealthy property = freedom link. But I think it might actually be possible to sidestep it by coming up with something like ‘information feudalism’ or ‘cyberfeudalism’ as a catchy term for IP rent-seeking or patent trolling. (Of course, ‘rent-seeking’ and ‘patent trolling’ are already pretty snappy.) To put the point another way, lots of folks are so averse to ‘government regulation’ that you will never get them to trade ‘private property’ talk for ‘regulation’ talk, as Yglesias suggests. But really what these folks are operating with is a kind of centralized = lots of regulation; decentralized = deregulated mental shortcut. The advantage of ‘feudalism’ would be to break that by making vivid the obvious possibility that decentralized stuff can still be too highly regulated, in effect.

UPDATE: turns out someone wrote the book already. Or at least picked a great title already.

In my previous post, I neglected one point.  Reading Foucault is one useful path out of extreme positions of methodological individualism.  By methodological individualism I mean the view that "method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals," as Wikipedia puts it.

Foucault understood how actual historical explanation relies on the use of broad categories, classes, and exemplars, and in a manner which is not logically reducible to statements about individual beliefs and desires.  The writer (theorist) has nothing close to a complete mental model of how the interacting categories reduce to component individual parts, and so some or most of the moving parts of the explanation retain their autonomy at a partially macro level.  The Austrians will kick and scream on this one, but if you combine imperfect information and the sense/reference distinction, methodological individualism ends up as more of a slogan than anything else.  There is a reflective equilibrium to the explanatory process, and micro relies on some macro foundations, not just vice versa, and individuals rely on the social for some of their cues.  Atomistic reduction to the level of the individual in general will not succeed.

The denier of strict MI is not committed to extreme Hegelian views about the autonomous existence of collectivities and it is debatable how much even Hegel himself made that mistake.

I grant that Foucault takes his own method too far in the anti-individualist direction, as did Hegel.

Foucault is by no means the only or even the best path out of extreme methodological individualism.  See this article by David Levy or late Wittgenstein or William James on pluralism, for instance, or more recently Geoffrey Hodgson, perhaps the best place to start.  Here is a quick overview of some of the debates, though it does not cover the best criticisms.  Neuroeconomics, and modular models of the mind, also can be read as critiques of MI, suggesting, as did Nozick, there is no particular reason to stop at the level of the individual in doing the explanation.

Oddly, for all their talk about methodological individualism, economists hardly ever engage in the medium for which it is most appropriate: biography.

A while ago I wrote a review essay on biography and economics.  Here's a challenge: if economics is so powerful, and MI is so persuasive, try writing a biography of a person, using economic tools, and see how much of that person's life you can explain.  It is a humbling and instructive experience and you can read my attempt here.

Via Karl Smith (who raises some good objections of his own), I see that Greg Mankiw is the author of a paper (PDF) proposing that economists stop using an implicitly utilitarian moral theory, and instead embrace “Just Deserts” morality:

Let me propose the following principle: People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his. This perspective is, I believe, what Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and other classically liberal writers have in mind. We might call it the Just Deserts Theory.

I am drawn to this approach in part by reflecting on some of the public anger that we see over some very high incomes. My sense is that people are rarely outraged when high incomes go to those who obviously earned them. When we see Steven Spielberg make blockbuster movies, Steve Jobs introduce the iPod, David Letterman crack funny jokes, and J.K Rowling excite countless young readers with her Harry Potter books, we don’t object to the many millions of dollars they earn in the process. The high incomes that generate anger are those that come from manipulating the system. The CEO who pads the corporate board with his cronies and the banker whose firm survives only by virtue of a government bailout do not seem to deserve their multimillion dollar bonuses. The public perceives them (correctly or incorrectly) as getting more than they contributed to society. That is, if we take public attitudes as a gauge of our innate moral intuitions, then in evaluating distributive justice, we should focus not on the marginal utility of different individuals but on the congruence between their contributions and their compensation.

This is definitely not Robert Nozick’s view. Not the view espoused in Anarchy, State, And Utopia and not the views he held later in life either. And I’m pretty sure that Milton Friedman—like most classical liberals—was, in fact, a utilitarianish consequentialist.

And this is for good reason. It’s pretty clear if you read the paper that Mankiw doesn’t intend to be arguing for any really radical changes in the structure of American society. He wants to defend modern industrial capitalism, while bolstering the case for lower taxation of the rich and less generous spending on the non-rich. But think about his examples here. How is it that you can get rich writing books, making movies, designing MP3 players, or making TV shows? Well it’s thanks to statutory definitions of intellectual property. If the copyright on a book only lasted two years, JK Rowling wouldn’t be nearly as rich. If the inventor of the Xerox Alto owned some kind of perpetual right to the concept of a graphical user interface, Steve Jobs’ whole career would be unimaginable. And the firms involved in these industries are constantly “manipulating the system” of intellectual property to try to maximize their own advantage.

That’s not to say that Rowling just got rich manipulating the system or that she’s contributed nothing of value to society. But this whole system she’s operating in is justified in consequentialist terms (“[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”) rather than desert. You could see that in utilitarian terms or in some kind of Rawlsian prioritarian terms or various other options. But I think a serious effort to try to recreate the economy in desert-based terms would involve a pretty radical rethinking of the way society works, not extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Mankiw should also consider that peoples intuitions about desert aren’t very conservative economisty. Normal people are always talking about how professional baseball players don’t deserve to get paid more than teachers.

Joshua Miller, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Another cut on local knowledge: what is economics' relationship to Michel Foucault? Often I see folks like you and Hanson making points that the rest of the social sciences and humanities would call Foucauldian, about the role of disciplinary power in knowledge-production, but you don't seem to ever reference or perhaps even read him. Perhaps he is simply not considered very interesting? Given the fact that there is some history of economics in his "Les Mots and les choses," I'd think there'd be more of an attempt to discredit or claim him.

Foucault is interesting, but use him with caution.  Most of his books have not held up very well as history, even if he succeeded in drawing people's attention to some neglected factors.  On top of that, his theoretical framework is incoherent.  Try reading The Archaeology of Knowledge.  I find The Order of Things to be an insightful but skewed account of the seventeenth century; detailed objections aside, it goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas.  It's much more micro and disaggregated than he lets on, but still I am glad I read the book.  This volume is a good, readable introduction to his work.

Perhaps Foucault is best on prisons and hospitals, though again caveat emptor on the history.  His most valuable insight, both theoretically and historically, is that what appears to be "enlightenment" (or for that matter "Enlightenment") is often anything but.

Foucault is important, and he deserves to be read, but I am not sure he will be much read fifty years from now.  I also view "engaging with him" as a much overdone and much overrated exercise, carried in large part by the less salubrious tendencies in Continental and U.S. humanities scholarly discourse.  It is better to simply work on the topics he cared about, using his books as a reminder to consider some different angles.

Did you know that Foucault -- at least the late Foucault -- appreciated Mises, Hayek, and Friedman?

I’m interested in the nature of reality and particularly the boundaries and scope of the social construction of reality.  I think social construction clearly plays an important role, but the question is, how “strong” is that role?   For example, I think the performativity argument (and associated “strong programme”) pushes the social construction argument way too far.

But let’s get more specific: what role do categories, language and naming play in the construction of reality?

One empirical setting for actually studying this question is the case of color categories and color naming, an active area of research in linguistics, computer science and psychology.  Scholars in this space have looked at whether the extant categories and names of colors of particular languages impact what individuals actually see and remember.  The famous Sapir-Whorf thesis of course argued, broadly, that language, categories and culture strongly determine perception and reality.  But, the color research shows otherwise.  Languages with highly fine-grained distinctions for individual colors, as well as languages with relatively few (or even no!) distinctions and names for color, lead to the same perceptions and experiences of color.  (Check out the citations below to see the clever way in which this is empirically tested.)

Well, almost. Recent work is making some important qualifications to the argument (articulating a middle ground, of sorts, between universality and strong construction), and there clearly is a very active debate in this space.

Here are some links to this literature:

Berlin & Kay. 1991 (2nd edition).  Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution.  University of California Press.
Lindsey & Brown. 2006.  Universality of color names.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103: 16608-16613.
Terry Regier, Paul Kay, Aubrey Gilbert, and Richard Ivry. 2010. Language and thought: Which side are you on, anyway? In B. Malt and P. Wolff (Eds.), Words and the Mind: Perspectives on the Language-Thought Interface. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ke Zhou, Lei Mo, Paul Kay, Veronica P.Y. Kwok, Tiffany N.M. Ip, & Li Hai Tan. 2010. Newly trained lexical categories produce lateralized categorical perception of color. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107: 9974-9978.
See Paul Kay’s web site.
Also check out the World Color Survey @ Berkeley.

Now, I don’t, by any means, think that the color research necessarily is a knock-down argument against social construction.  But I do think this research definitely questions the “strong” form of construction — I have opportunistically cited and referred to these and other findings to make that point.  And another, perhaps unfair, knockdown argument is that no matter what linguistic categories a color-blind person has, it simply won’t matter in the perception of color.

There is of course much debate in the color literature as well and some of the work points toward a particular, softer form of construction.   And, the color research of course is just one setting, and the findings may not generalize to other settings.  But I do like the fact that the color research actually allows us to more rigorously say some things — with the usual qualifications and questions — about the specific role that language (as well as categories, culture etc) plays in the way we perceive the world.

A Paul Krugman post gives me an excellent excuse to make a point I’ve been sitting on since Saturday. He says his approach is broadly Rawlsian in nature:

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

The further away I get from TM Scanlon’s Philosophy 178 course on Equality and Democracy the more I worry that some of Rawls’ modeling assumptions is a bigger deal than is usually made clear in these kind of undergraduate classes. Rawls basically assumes a closed economy with no trade, no immigration, and no emigration. He’s hardly the first person in the universe to do this, and indeed you see a lot of closed economy models in economics since for some circumstances it’s often approximately true and it makes the math easier. In both the philosophical and economic realms, people are of course well aware that this isn’t true. But while Rawls has a separate book on international issues and there’s a very robust controversy as to whether his take gives short slight to rich countries’ obligations to poor ones, this whole line of thought is rarely read back into the basic presentation of Rawls’ views.

And in the 1970s this was probably right. After all, you can only squeeze so much into one semester. But the mixed economy arose in a kind of odd time when a huge swathe of the world wasn’t really interested in playing host to low-wage export-oriented manufacturing and the West’s relationship to those countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) there were interested in doing so was dominated by considerations of Cold War strategy. The fall of Communism in Europe, the opening of China, the demise of the “license raj” in India, etc. are all good things for the world. But they’re quite problematic in terms of the theory and practice of egalitarian liberalism in the rich world in a way that I think isn’t always appreciated. It’s of course quite possible that teaching practice has changed a lot in the past 10 years, but in terms of my own undergraduate education I think the issues in this neighborhood were under-emphasized compared to what seems important to me in today’s debates.

The insistence we often hear in recent years that there is no longer any divide between analytic and continental philosophers always sounds to me like a paradigm case of protesting-too-much. There is at the very least something the existence of which it makes sense to deny, call it what you will, even though we agree that the positive research program of analytic philosophy has been dead for at least 40 years, and that 'continental' philosophy is in fact overwhelmingly états-unienne.

Brian Leiter thinks that this something is really just a difference of quality, with 'analytic' standing in for 'high quality' and 'continental' for 'low'. [Note: The irony of writing sous rature at such a moment is not lost on me, but Brian has been in touch to express disagreement with my characterization of his view, so I would like to try again to give a more adequate account of it. What he does believe, I hope I can say, is that the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the principal organization committed to promoting what is generally called 'continental philosophy' in North America, is an organization committed to the promotion of bad philosophy (a relevant quotation from Brian: "There's an entire professional organization, SPEP, which champions bad work on and inspired by the Continental traditions in philosophy." However, Brian also holds to the view I mentioned in the first paragraph, that the distinction between the two schools is a meaningless one, and that much good work is done on Continental traditions in philosophy, just not, generally, by those working under the umbrella of SPEP. These views taken together do not seem all that different from the view I initially attributed to Brian: that the people who --rightly or wrongly-- organize themselves under the banner of 'Continental' philosophy tend to be doing bad philosophy, quite apart from any consideration of whether they ought to be organizing themselves in this way or claiming this label for themselves. Whatever they are called, Brian thinks they are doing bad philosophy. Moreover, most people call them 'continental' philosophers. Brian evidently thinks it's regrettable that this is how they are called, and on this we are in agreement.]

Now back to the scheduled programming. At times I've maintained that the distinction is entirely institutional and sociological, and that it is getting things backwards to focus on internal doctrinal differences as the cause of the rift. But on further reflection it now seems to me most just to return to Thomas Nagel's old characterization (and I do not recall precisely where this occurs) of the difference as resulting from the typical orientation of the pre-philosophical educations of analytic and continental philosophers-in-the-making, with analytic philosophers frequently coming from a background in the natural sciences (or at least from a background that inculcated appreciation of the natural sciences), and continental philosophers coming from a background in the more poetic or expressive corners of the humanities.

If this account is correct, it follows that the rift needs to be understood as a symptom of a much more general problem, that it is just one instance of the famous two-cultures problem, rather than an internal affair of philosophy departments alone. If the local rift is to be closed, then, perhaps this might best be brought about not by the definitive triumph of the science-oriented philosophers over the literature-oriented ones (which is to say of the good over the bad, or, which amounts the same, of the high-status over the low-status), but rather by a vastly more significant reconciliation of the natural and the human sciences, one that takes seriously the old conception of the humanities as sciences (or Wissenschaften in the broad sense), and thus that accepts that the humanities and the natural sciences are two different but often overlapping branches of the same general project.

The scientific character of the humanities is something, it seems to me, that remained clear until the middle of the 20th century, at which point numerous factors --from the math-and-physics elitism of scientifically oriented analytic philosophers to the suspicion of 'grand narratives' characteristic of poststructuralism and deconstruction-- began to hasten a split. As a lucid transdepartmental thinker such as Immanuel Wallerstein is able to recognize, this is a split that would not have made any sense not only to Aristotle, but even to Kant, as late as the end of the 18th century. In Wallerstein's view, the split is an artefact of the triumph of classical liberalism, which artificially divides the natural from the human, as well as subdividing the human into the political, the economic, and the socio-cultural. Given that the era of the dominance of liberal thought appears to be drawing to a close, Wallerstein thinks --and I very much concur--, perhaps it is time to hasten a new Streit der Facultäten that will issue in a new way of organizing the study of humanity and its place in nature.

I believe that in setting about this task, we would do well to pay close attention to the way the artificial split between the natural and the human impacts the organization of the various branches of the study of the past. This is not just because I myself am professionally interested in the past, but also because I believe that it is in large part a remnant of skeptical worries about the non-scientific character of the study of any non-repeatable past events or even of any uniformitarian processes, the same skepticism that led Popper to call evolutionary theory a 'metaphysical research programme', that has led to the bracketing as hopelessly non-scientific of the humanities in general, lean heavily on the past, as they do, to the extent that the study of human culture is inescapably the study of human tradition. 

It has been a long time since Popper put forth such a hard line for philosophers of science, and discriminators of non-science, to toe. Since then (and even at that time, to be fair), much work has been done to secure for the study of past, non-repeatable events the status, more than honorary, of science. Mutatis mutandis, much of what has been argued in the case of evolutionary biology applies equally well to the study of deep human history: prehistoric migration patterns and so on. There is a rich consilience of inductions, as well as rigorous models tested both by computer and in real-world case studies, of how, say, the New World was first populated. Yet in matters pertaining to the development of aspects of culture we often find members of the academy taking up the very same position creationists take relative to evolution: dismissing it as 'just a theory' or, to use their slightly more elevated language, dismissing the attempts of people in centers of power to explain this or that aspect of an indigenous culture, even a culture that has been extinct for millennia, as just more of the 'hegemonic discourse'. This is the humanities effectively declining to be taken seriously, the humanities refusing to be the human sciences.

Foucault spoke metaphorically of an 'archaeology of knowledge', but it seems to me that what this misses is that archaeology already was itself the archaeology of knowledge, which consisted in the digging up, analyzing, and interpreting of fragments of material cultures past, some of which had writing on them (e.g., Greek columns) and some of which did not (e.g., Neanderthal burial mounds). Through sophisticated modelling and induction I do not see why from fragments of material culture one should not be able to construct hypotheses about the beliefs, the 'epistemologies', of people far removed in time. Writing makes this task a great deal easier, but even there it is often very hard, and much of what might controversially be described as proto-writing (Babylonian clay tablets, Mayan pictographs, etc.) stands at least as much in need of interpretation as, say, the layout of a village ruin.

No one has done a more thorough job of spelling out the scientific epistemology of archaeology than Alison Wylie (see in particular her Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, University of California Press, 2002). She reveals an endeavor that is  thoroughly scientific, even if it does not conform to all the standards of paradigmatic scientificity set by physics and revered by early analytic philosophers. It studies something non-repeatable (so do evolutionary biology and big-bang cosmology), though it is nonetheless falsifiable in just the same way the other sciences of the past are (as a fossil rabbit from the Pre-Cambrian would have caused J. B. S. Haldane, so he said, to abandon his commitment to evolution), and also built upon countless domains of inquiry whose status as science are perfectly secure (e.g., the chemical analysis of soil).

In its indifference to the distinction between textuality and non-textuality --it digs things up and 'reads' them, whether they have letters written on them or not-- archaeology provides a model of the sort of approach to the human sciences that I believe could greatly help to overcome their estrangement from the natural sciences. Archaeology as traditionally conceived --before post-processualism came in and destroyed its scientific aspirations in exactly the same way that post-structuralism destroyed the aspirations of anthropology, and deconstruction the aspirations of textual studies-- cannot fail to see human culture as a particular kind of natural excrescence, one that eventually sinks back into the earth and intermingles again with the stuff of nature against which it set itself up in opposition for a short while. In this sense, unlike the academic discipline of history as currently conceived, archaeology cannot set up a buffer zone out of the non-textual human past ('prehistory') that preserves a distance between the proper domain […]

I think Adam Ozimek’s post on “The Visceral Externality of Prostitution” nicely illustrates why nobody likes economists:

Say Ray’s friend Lenore wants to purchase Ray’s prostitution services and she values them at $400. But when Lenore does this it bothers Ray’s other friend Tonya. If the negative utility Tonya experiences is worth more than $400, then the market provides a mechanism for Tonya to satisfy her wants: she can pay Ray $401 not to sleep with Lenore. [...]

People will probably object that this is unbelievable, and that even if it happened once in a while, in the real world this would never be enough objectors to affect the quantity of prostitution. I think this is correct. After all, the objectors would have to value preventing prostitution at more than average rate of $300 an hour in order to outbid the existing buyers. But what this tells you is that the marginal utility gained from prostitution by consumers would vastly exceeds the marginal disutility to objectors.

I think objectors know. After all, market based solutions are possible and yet you never hear objectors push for anything but prohibition. This tells me that their willingness to pay is pretty low, and therefore so is their disutility.

This misses the fact that a big part of the point of prostitution prohibition laws is to express social disapproval of prostitutes and prostitution. Indeed, people seem generally quite unconcerned about whether prostitution is occurring someplace out of sight and out of mind. But they want to reserve the right to strongly disapprove of both the prostitution and especially the prostitutes. You can analogize a person who engaged in a form of sexual or commercial conduct of which you disapprove by referring to that person as a “whore.” It’s an insult. Its insult status reflects and upholds a social consensus that whores are bad people, not just that whoring is a kind of undesirable nuisance. Side-payments can’t address this issue.

I think the best way to think about prostitution prohibition is just to observe that we’ve historically done a lot of stuff to bolster the privileged position of heterosexual companionate marriage. This has entailed a lot of avoidable cruelty to gays and lesbians, sexually active women, children of unmarried women, and voluntary prostitutes. But the cruelty isn’t a pointless side-effect that can be reduced through better policy design. The cruelty is integral to obtaining the objective. Over time, counterveiling humane impulses have tended to win out. But that’s the issue.

Where Mill argues that Representative Government is not applicable in some cases

Perseus text of the Hiero