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28The Great Arnauld and Some of His Philosophical CorrespondentsJournal of the History of Philosophy 34 (3): 461-463. 1996.BOOK REVIEWS 461 Edwin Curley's "Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza and the Science of Hermeneutics" takes as its starting point Savan's claim that Spinoza is the "founder of scientific hermeneutics." Rejccting the most extreme interpretation of this claim -- i.e., that Spinoza created scientific hermeneutics ex nihilo -- Curlcy carefully compares Spi- noza's contributions to Biblical criticism with those of Hobbes and Isaac La Peyr~re, and concludes that Spinoza's work possesses, in addi…Read more
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27Average explanationsErkenntnis 30 (1-2). 1989.Good scientific explanations sometimes appear to make use of averages. Using concrete examples from current economic theory, I argue that some confusions about how averages might work in explanations lead to both philosophical and economic problems about the interpretation of the theory. I formulate general conditions on potentially proper uses of averages to refine a notion of average explanation. I then try to show how this notion provides a means for resolving longstanding philosophical probl…Read more
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27Are economic kinds naturalIn C. Wade Savage (ed.), Scientific Theories, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 14--102. 1990.
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25Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism (review)Philosophical Review 101 (3): 679-681. 1992.
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15Proofs for the Existence of GodIn Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Descartes' Meditations, Blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains section titled: The Simplicity of Descarteś Proofs and the Relation between Them The Causal Argument The Ontological Argument.
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918 Two models of idealization in economicsIn Uskali Mäki (ed.), The Economic World View: Studies in the Ontology of Economics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 359. 2001.
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8The Rationalist ImpulseIn A Companion to Rationalism, Blackwell. 2005.This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.
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5Proust and the Rationalist Conception of the SelfIn A Companion to Rationalism, Blackwell. 2005.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction I II.
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5Cartesian InnatenessIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Blackwell. 2007.This chapter contains section titled: Acknowledgments References and Further Reading.
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4Review of Alexander Rosenberg: Economics: mathematical politics or science of diminishing returns? (review)Ethics 104 (3): 637-639. 1994.
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2To a reader voyaging through the Meditations for the first time, Descartes' proofs for the existence of God can seem daunting, especially the argument of Meditation III, with its appeal to causal principles that seem arcane, and to medieval doctrines about different modes of being and degrees of reality. First-time readers are not alone in feeling bewildered. Many commentators have had the same reaction. In an attempt at charity, some of them have tried to tame the complexity of Descartes' discussion by .. (review)In Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Descartes' Meditations, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 2--104. 2006.
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2Philosophical Systems and Their HistoryIn Mogens Laerke, Justin E. H. Smith & Eric Schliesser (eds.), Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford University Press Usa. 2013.I advocate a method that strives to interpret important historical figures in philosophy as presenting philosophical systems of thought. This kind of systematic interpretation, as I shall call it, begins with the supposition that the philosophy being interpreted is itself systematic. This sometimes requires recovering the obscured systematicity. Section I gives a positive characterization of systematic interpretations. Section II notes some of the special obstacles that these interpretations mus…Read more
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Modality in Descartes's philosophyIn Otávio Bueno & Scott A. Shalkowski (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Modality, Routledge. 2018.
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Divisibility and Cartesian ExtensionIn Daniel Garber & Steven Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Volume V, Oxford University Press Uk. 2010.
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Methodology, reality and economic orthodoxy A review of Tony Lawson's Economics and RealityJournal of Economic Methodology 10 (3): 420-424. 2003.
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Saving Economics From PhilosophyDissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago. 1984.Chapter 1 is introductory. It identifies a cluster of philosophical problems that arise in the foundations of neoclassical economic theory. Issues growing out of the unusually tenuous connection between the theory and the world are singled out as especially troublesome. Is it, after all, possible for economics to look more like an empirical science like physics than like of branch of mathematics? ;Chapter 2 argues that economic methodology has been constrained by the application of faulty philos…Read more
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