Daniel Schulthess

In his Theory of moral Sentiments , Adam Smith does not deal only with interpersonal moral issues. He also addresses some economic and political consequences that tie with his analysis of ‘sympathy’. Interestingly, these socially relevant outcomes do not feature as products of sympathy proper, but rather as byproducts of certain ‘irregularities’ or biases which affect the way sympathy actually works. The stability of a political society through a system of ‘ranks’ which are spontaneously granted a share of authority thus gets projected beyond the reach of a rational approach, e.g. of a contractarian character. Although the idea of a spontaneous order certainly attracts Adam Smith here as elsewhere, his approach of the economic and political sphere in TMS is nevertheless tinged with a tone of moral criticism which must be taken seriously

Leibniz presents himself, especially in his late correspondence with Remond, as a concordist: in other philosophical views, even distant and ancient ones, he sets out to discover «traces of truth» that are already present there. According to the concordist programme, Leibniz claims, philosophers are right in what they affi rm, and wrong in what they deny. This paradoxical asymmetry is given a logical explanation in the paper, in connection with the topic of «reduplication», i. e. the introduction of qualifi cations in otherwise simple categorical propositions. In order to be right in affi rming a complex disjunctive proposition, it is enough for one of the disjuncts to be true; but in order to be right in negating a complex disjunctive proposition, it is required for all of them to be false. Meanwhile, if one may «qualify» propositions by different reduplications of their terms, in principle one of those qualifi ed propositions is bound to be true. On such presuppositions concordism can be expected to be quite effective as a meta-philosophical perspective