Eric Schliesser

This chapter explores Nagel’s polemics. It shows these have a two-fold character: to defend liberal civilization against all kinds of enemies. And to defend what he calls ‘contextual naturalism.’ And the chapter shows that reinforce each other and undermine alternative political and philosophical programs. The chapter’s argument responds to an influential argument by George Reisch that Nagel’s professional stance represents a kind of disciplinary retreat from politics. In order to respond to Reisch the relationship between Nagel’s philosophy of science and his politics is explored and this chapter shows how both are anchored in what Nagel once called his ‘contextual naturalism’—a metaphysics that resists imposing the unity of the world and treats all entities as embedded in a wider network of entities. Part of the argument traces out how Nagel’s views on responsible speech and professionalism reflect a distinct understanding of the political role of philosophers of science.

This chapter explores Nagel’s polemics. It shows these have a two-fold character: (i) to defend liberal civilization against all kinds of enemies. And (ii) to defend what he calls ‘contextual naturalism.’ And the chapter shows that (i-ii) reinforce each other and undermine alternative political and philosophical programs. The chapter’s argument responds to an influential argument by George Reisch that Nagel’s professional stance represents a kind of disciplinary retreat from politics. In order to respond to Reisch the relationship between Nagel’s philosophy of science and his politics is explored and this chapter shows how both are anchored in what Nagel once called his ‘contextual naturalism’—a metaphysics that resists imposing the unity of the world and treats all entities as embedded in a wider network of entities. Part of the argument traces out how Nagel’s views on responsible speech and professionalism reflect a distinct understanding of the political role of philosophers of science.

"In this introduction I use Bertrand Russell's (1945) The History of Western Philosophy (hereafter: History), to introduce the meta-philosophical themes that recur throughout the chapters of this book. In particular, I focus on the way the distinction or opposition between rustic thought, which is supposed to characterize barbarous societies, and the urbane thought that is purported to characterize civilized society can help explain some entrenched patterns of exclusion visible in contemporary philosophy. I embed these remarks in a larger, speculative historiography of the very idea of 'western philosophy.' Along the way, I provide an overview of the chapters of this volume"--

This paper argues that a debate between Toland and Clarke is the intellectual context to help understand the motive behind the critic and the significance of Berkeley's response to the critic in PHK 60-66. These, in turn, are responding to Boyle's adaptation of a neglected design argument by Cicero. The paper shows that there is an intimate connection between these claims of natural science and a once famous design argument. In particular, that in the early modern period the connection between the scientific revolution and a certain commitment to final causes, and god's design, is more than merely contingent. The details of PHK 60-66 support the idea that the critic is responding to concerns that by echoing features of Toland's argument Berkeley undermines the Newtonian edifice Clarke has constructed.

This paper explains Sophie de Grouchy’s philosophical debts to Adam Smith. I have three main reasons for this: first, it should explain why eighteenth-century philosophical feminists found Smith, who has—to put it mildly—not been a focus of much recent feminist admiration, a congenial starting point for their own thinking; second, it illuminates De Grouchy’s considerable philosophical originality, especially her important, overlooked contributions to political theory; third, it is designed to remove some unfortunate misconceptions that have found their way into Karin Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to the recent and much-to-be-welcomed translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Lettres Sur La Sympathie. While Brown claims that there are major ‘differences’ in their programs of ‘social reform’, I argue there are important commonalities between Smith and De Grouchy. In particular, I highlight how they share a common understanding of how human sensibilities are shaped by social institutions and I show that De Grouchy’s path-breaking analysis of negative and positive liberty is grounded in her extension of Smith’s political theory and moral psychology.

In this paper I distinguish four methods of empirical inquiry in eighteenth century natural philosophy. In particular, I distinguish among what I call, the mathematical-experimental method; the method of experimental series; the method of inspecting ideas; the method of natural history. While such a list is not exhaustive of the methods of inquiry available, even so, focusing on these four methods will help in diagnosing a set of debates within what has come to be known as ‘empiricism’; throughout the eighteenth century there was a methodological reaction against the hegemonic aspirations of mathematical natural philosophy associated with the authority of Newton.In particular, I argue that the methods of inspecting ideas and natural history remained attractive to ‘empiricist’ thinkers with reservations about aspects of Newtonianism. Moreover, I show that the language of experimentalism meant different things to researchers with different attitudes toward Newton’s legacy. In order to illustrate and make more precise these claims, I embed my taxonomic treatment of the four methods within a narrative in which I primarily focus on Colin Maclaurin, Isaac Newton, David Hume, and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon.

This paper offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group's philosophizing in order to illuminate characteristic features that may still resonate in today's philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of individual authors. These philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. American philosophers suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life.

In this essay, I discuss Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds and Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life from a methodological perspective. I show that these both instantiate what I call ‘synthetic philosophy.’ They are both Darwinian philosophers of science who draw on each other’s work. In what follows I first elaborate on synthetic philosophy in light of From Bacteria and Other Minds; I also explain my reasons for introducing the term; and I close by looking at the function of Darwinism in contemporary synthetic philosophy.

Sophie de Grouchy: The Tradition of Two Liberties and the Missing Mother of LiberalismIn this paper, I treat Sophie de Grouchy as an important contributor to liberal reflection on the famous distinction between two kinds of liberty. I place her in the intellectual context of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and show it is likely that Benjamin Constant was familiar with her work. Along the way, by engaging with Isaiah Berlin and with Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver, I make some suggestions on the nature of an intellectual tradition worth having.

The introduction considers the state of scholarship on empiricism as a philosophical and historical category, particularly as it pertains to experimental philosophy. It concludes that empiricism properly understood is a rich category encompassing epistemic, semantic, methodological, experimental, and moral elements. Its richness makes it a suitable lens through which to account for actual historical complexity. The introduction relates the category to the work of Sir Isaac Newton, who influenced all of empiricism’s elements.

Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is not. However, the second tension shows that Newton conceives laws as formal causes of bodies and forces. This neo-Aristotelian conception goes missing in Kantian accounts of laws, as well as accounts that stress laws’ grounding in powers and capacities.

A full third of the book is devoted to "Buddhist themes," and although I am unfortunately unqualified to comment on its exegetical and interpretative quality, I can report that I found the discussion fascinating and enlightening. Priest gives us clear, precise, technical, and philosophically sophisticated theorizing based around these thinkers, giving the lie to the not-uncommon trope among analytic philosophers that so-called "continental" and Eastern thought are inherently wooly, without rigor.1At the start of her insightful and disconcerting essay, Amy Olberding mentions that "while responsibility for the conversational practices" that "exclude" and are forms of boundary policing "are...

This article addresses the question how philosophy should be evaluated in a research-grant funding environment. It offers a new conception of philosophy that is inclusive and builds on familiar elements of professional, philosophical practice. Philosophy systematically questions the questions we ask, the concepts we use, and the values we hold. Its product is therefore rarely conclusive but can be embodied in everything we do. This is typical of explorative research and differentiates it from exploitative research, which constitutes the bulk of funded research activity. This article argues that exploratory research is crucial for long-term progress and requires a distinct evaluative regime.

In this article, the author offers a discussion of the evidential role of the Galilean constant in the history of physics. The author argues that measurable constants help theories constrain data. Theories are engines for research, and this helps explain why the Duhem-Quine thesis does not undermine scientific practice. The author connects his argument to discussion of two famous papers in the history of economic methodology, Milton Friedman’s “Methodology of Positive Economics,” which appealed to example of Galilean Law of Fall in its argument; and Vernon Smith’s “Economics in the Laboratory.” While the author offers some criticism of Friedman and Smith, most of the article is a friendly reinterpretation of their insights.

Chapter one is an introduction. In chapter two, I argue that, due to a lack of knowledge of Newton, Hume is unable to use the "Science of Man" to provide a foundation for the other sciences. Hume's account of causality and the missing shade of blue receive special attention. Hume tries, without paying attention to scientific practice, to constrain what science can be about. ;In chapter three, I reconstruct Adam Smith's epistemology. The major theoretical concept of Smith's moral psychology, the "Impartial Spectator," illuminates his views on the articulation and reception of scientific theories; it brings out the open-ended, social and norm-governed nature of science. Sentiments motivate inquiry, but adopting its results can still be reasonable. After Newton, Smith is not a skeptic, but a realist. ;In chapter four, I explain Smith's methodology in Wealth of Nations . Smith employs a model to enable observed deviations from expected regularities to uncover genuine social causes and aid in improving theory in a potentially open-ended process of successive approximation. I draw on The History of Astronomy where Smith attacks Descartes for trying to explain away deviations from general rules. ;In Chapter five, I explain the political aims of Smith's WN. Smith is an Incremental Redistributionist . Smith's reform proposals and the values that guide his theorizing are in aid of the working poor. I attack a possible political counter-argument against this by attending to Smith's historical understanding of property; Smith's defense of property rights, following Hume's critique of Locke, is by no means absolute. Yet, Smith's appeals to "humanity" appear without justification in WN. ;In chapter six, I investigate the purpose of philosophy in commercial society. In the debate between Rousseau and Hume on philosophic self-understanding, between self-sufficiency and independence, Smith sides with the latter. Smith emphasizes, however, that once basic needs are met, friendship among equals is a more valuable than wealth; it provides happiness and is within every one's reach. Philosophers can enjoy immortality after death if they attempt to be benefactors to humanity, but Smith believes that philosophic friendship is its own and highest reward

In this paper I call attention to Adam Smith’s 'Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages' in order to facilitate understanding Adam Smith from a Darwinian perspective. By ‘Darwinian’ I mean a position that explains differential selection over time through natural mechanisms. First, I argue that right near the start of Wealth of Nations Smith signals that human nature has probably evolved over a very long amount of time. Second, I connect this evidence with an infamous passage on infanticide in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to argue that Smith is committed to group selection. Third, I argue that in Dissertation on Languages one can find building blocks for the claim that mind and language co-develop over time. More controversially I claim that in TMS there is a distinction between natural sentiments and moral sentiments. Natural sentiments are evolved (presumably through cultural selection) and moral sentiments are developed (through acculturation within society). Along the way, I argue that this distinction would have improved Darwin’s Descent of Man by blocking a move toward eugenics.

In this essay, I use a general argument about the evidential role of data in ongoing inquiry to show that it is fruitful for economic historians and historians of economics to collaborate more frequently. The shared aim of this collaboration should be to learn from past economic experience in order to improve the cutting edge of economic theory. Along the way, I attack a too rigorous distinction between the history of economics and economic history. By drawing on the history of physics, I argue that the history of a discipline can be a source of important evidence in ongoing inquiry. My argument relies on the claim that it is a constitutive element of science that evidence is never discarded forever and is thus historical in nature. In the final section, I offer a case study by explaining a research proposal that turns on a long-running data-set Babylonian whole-sale prices of six commodities noted in pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic times. To motivate my reading of this data-set, I critically discuss Aristotle's successful attempt to distinguish between astrology and political economy.

In this paper I investigate two denials in Milton Friedman's Nobel Lecture (1976). The first is [i] the denial that 'Economics and its fellow social sciences' ought to be 'regarded more nearly as branches of philosophy.' The second is [ii] the denial that economics is 'enmeshed with values at the outset because they deal with human behaviour' (267). I show that Friedman's appeal to his methodology in the Nobel lecture fails on conceptual grounds internal to Friedman's methodology. Moreover, I show that the failure is related to a broader systematic problem: when properly understood, Friedman's methodology shows that positive economics is (in a non-trivial sense) enmeshed in values. In order to account for Friedman's overreaching, I turn to the charged social context regarding Friedman's purported involvement with the Chicago Boys, who were then serving Chilean Dictator Pinochet. I conclude by explaining why I re-open the old chestnut of values in positive science. The episode allows me to raise a question of fundamental import about the relationship between expertise and society.

The main aim of this paper is to explore why it is so important for Hume to defi ne ‘cause’ as he does. This will shed light on the signifi cance of the natural/philosophical relation (hereafter NPR) distinction in the Treatise. Hume's use of the NPR distinction allows him to dismiss on general grounds conceptions of causation at odds with his own. In particular, it allows him to avoid having to engage in detailed re-interpretation of potentially confl icting theories formulated by natural philosophers. Moreover, it provides an instance of the normative nature of Hume's “science of man.” The paper argues that the NPR distinction - in conjunction with the so-called copy principle - is meant to undercut appeals to the authority of theories not founded on Hume's “principles.” In order to illustrate its claims about Hume, this essay explores some aspects of Newton's natural philosophy. Finally, this paper resolves a long-standing interpretive problem: how to reconcile Hume's two “defi nitions” of causation in the Treatise.

This paper focuses on Warren Nutter’s The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899-1939. This started out as a (1949) doctoral dissertation at The University of Chicago, part of Aaron Director’s Free Market Study. Besides Director, O.H. Brownlee and Milton Friedman were closely involved with supervising it. It was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1951. In the 1950s the book was explicitly understood as belonging to the “Chicago School” (Dow and Abernathy 1963). By articulating the content, context, and reception of Nutter’s monograph, this paper discusses four larger themes. First, I introduce the importance of Kuhnian conceptions of science to the methodological and institutional understanding of economics in the development of a ‘Chicago’ school of economics. I do this in context of previously unpublished Stigler-Kuhn exchange. While Thomas Kuhn was widely read and adopted in the social sciences and humanities in the 1960s and 70s (and thereafter), I argue that at ‘Chicago,’ proto-Kuhnian language can be found going back to the 1940s; in those early days it is partly used to disparage the achievements of economic theorizing as promoted by others. A more self-congratulatory Kuhnian self-understanding of economics as a mature paradigm starts to get adopted around 1955 by George Stigler. One important new claim is that the later Kuhnian language gets adopted in part to divest ‘Chicago’ from its shared roots with Institutionalist economics. So, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the formation of a shared narrative at ‘Chicago.’ Second, I introduce contextual themes from Milton Friedman’s writings in the late 40s and 50s to help us understand the nature of realism at Chicago. Nutter’s dissertation helps in reading and illuminating Milton Friedman’s famous 1953 methodology paper in historical and intellectual context. Third, while this chapter notes some of the political ramifications of Chicago economics, my main aim is to help explain the manner in which Chicago attempted to chart a distinctive methodological course. This methodology has often been described as Marshallian with debts to the large-scale NBER studies. Rather than going over familiar territory, I call attention to the importance of proxies in Nutter’s empirical methodology. It is an unappreciated feature of the inductive, quantitative method that focused on the component structures of the economy that characterizes Chicago’s methodological outlook in this period. I show this by comparing Nutter’s dissertation to work done by Stigler, then at Columbia. We know from Stigler’s correspondence with Friedman that in this period they discussed methodological matters. What is less well known is that Friedman is explicitly credited for Stigler’s methodological insights in Stigler's Five Lectures at LSE. The fifth lecture, “Competition in the United States,” covers similar territory as Nutter’s project. Comparing the work by Stigler and Nutter sheds light on the nature of Chicago methodology as it was being developed away from foundations laid by Frank Knight and Henry Simons in the late 1940s and 1950s and opening up the door to (right wing) social engineering as exemplified by Harberger. I present my analysis through the published critical reception of both works among economists. A fourth reason to focus on Nutter’s dissertation is that it was featured in a Fortune magazine article in January 1952. So, it provides a useful entry into how politically important ‘Chicago’ research was marketed to a wider audience. This connects to issues explored by Phil Mirowski and his students, Rob van Horn and Eddie Nik-kah. So, Nutter’s dissertation can help us see how ‘sponsored’ research looks at ‘Chicago at the time. This is especially important because it has been claimed that Director’s Free Market Study group promoted a change from classically liberal views on monopoly, which condemned labor and employer monopolies, to a more pro-business stance.