John-Michael Kuczynski

The greater the extent to which a given system rewards the absence of merit, the greater the incentive that people within that system have to perpetuate that system. People who are falsely rewarded have a double stake in the perpetuation of whatever it is that falsely rewarded them. First, without that system and all of the lies surrounding it, such people lose their wealth and their social status. Second, without that system, such people lose their self-respect. The more a given person is overvalued, the more likely it is that his social status and self-image depend on specific institutions and, therefore, the more likely it is that he does not those institutions to be replaced or even improved.

The so-called ‘left’ has nothing to do with providing underprivileged groups with otherwise unavailable opportunities. The left does nothing positive for women, blacks or any other such group. And the left has no particular interest in protecting women from the supposed threat of male violence or abuse; nor does it have any particular interest in protecting blacks or latinos from the supposed threat of white violence or exploitation. The left is not the left at all; the left is not liberal. The so-called left represents bureaucratism, and its objective is to assimilate all people into an all encompassing, all-effacing bureaucracy.

Someone afflicted by mental illness is neurotic if he sees his symptoms as symptoms and psychotic if does not. A neurosis is therefore an 'ego-dystonic' mental illness, meaning that the viewpoint embodied in one's symptoms is not the viewpoint of the ego of the afflicted party. And a psychosis is therefore an 'ego-syntonic' illness, meaning that the viewpoint embodied in the symptoms coincides with that of the afflicted party's ego. Whereas ego-syntonic illnesses are unqualifiedly debilitating, ego-dystonic are sometimes adaptive and, within limits, may enhance the subject's ability to deploy his abilities. In this lecture, it is explained why this is so.

Kripke made a good case that ..... the phi....,, is not semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive meanings. Russell says that .... .the phi....,, is always to be analyzed attributively. Many semanticists, agreeing with Kripke that "...the phi....,, is not ambiguous, have tried to give a Russellian analysis of the referential-attributive distinction: the gross deviations between what is communicated by "...the phi".. on the one hand, and what Russell's theory says it literally means, on the other, are chalked up to implicature. This paper shows that, when the phenomenon of implicature is scrutinized, there is overwhelming reason to doubt that a Russellian analysis can succeed. A positive, non-Russellian analysis is proposed: it is shown that, if definite descriptions are treated as referring expressions, it is easy to deal with the referential-attributive distinction. When CC the ph....,, is functioning attributively, the definite description is seen as referring to some object described in an understood, antecedent existence claim

Climbing the ranks in academia is about forfeiting integrity. But if integrity is forfeited too soon, the person in question won't have the moral fiber needed to write a dissertation. And when this happens, the result is a perpetual dissertator. The phenomenon of being a perpetual dissertator has nothing to do with the difficulties supposedly inherent in writing a philosophy or economics dissertation. There are no such difficulties. The perpetual dissertator simply forfeited his moral fiber too soon.

Une introduction rapide aux problèmes fondamentaux de l'éthique, ce travail consiste en des réponses pointues et profondes aux questions fondamentales: * les obligations légales ont-elles un poids moral? * peut-on agir immoralement envers soi-même? * Quelle est la base objective des revendications morales légitimes? * Comment savons-nous le bien du mal? * Comment peut-il y avoir une responsabilité morale dans un monde déterministe? Rigoureux mais accessible, ce travail est une introduction idéale à l'éthique analytique et à la théorie de la valeur.