David Gordon

The view of the state held by Nock and Oppenheimer, according to which the state originated as a predatory body, is contrasted with that of Mises, for whom the state is needed to maintain a framework of law and order within which the free market can operate. Huerta de Soto, it is argued, bypasses the question of which view is correct, instead concentrating on a different but related question, the evolution of a legal system. In writing about this, de Soto has been greatly influenced by the work of Hayek and Bruno Leoni. So long as a legal system, not interrupted by arbitrary interventions, is in place, it does not much matter whether the state is an actor within that system. Like Leoni, Huerta de Soto contends that the notion of the evolution of a legal system can be applied to Roman law as well as common law.

Paul Cantor’s study of Shakespeare centered on the three Roman plays, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Anthony and Cleopatra. In his two books, Shakespeare’s Rome and Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, Cantor argued that Shakespeare uses the plays to develop an interpretation of Roman history from the height of the Republic through its fall, culminating in the Roman Empire. Shakespeare, on Cantor’s telling, displays a shrewd understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the different regimes and the human character each regime was dependent on and tried to develop. Not content with portraying Shakespeare as a political philosopher, Cantor argued that he also presents an interpretation of the rise of Christianity that bears a striking affinity with Nietzsche’s view of this topic, and comparisons with Hegel are made as well. In this essay, I concentrate on the interpretation of Christianity and its conflict with the Empire, though with some attention to the theory of government during the Republic as well. Cantor wrote from a perspective much influenced by Leo Strauss, and I will assess the merits and difficulties of this approach.

Honest signalling theory suggests that humans and chimpanzees can extract socially relevant information relating to personality from the faces of their conspecifics. Humans are also able to extract information from chimpanzees’ faces. Here, we examine whether personality characteristics of chimpanzees, including measures of psychopathy, can be discerned based purely on facial morphology in photographs. Twenty-one chimpanzees were given naïve and expert personality ratings on the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) and the Chimpanzee Triarchic Model of Psychopathy (CHMP-Tri) before and following behavioural observations. Characteristics relating to openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and disinhibition could be distinguished from the faces of chimpanzees. Individuals higher on disinhibition have lower scores on conscientiousness and emotional stability and higher scores on extraversion, while those higher on meanness have lower conscientiousness and agreeableness. Facial expressions are linked to personality traits present in the TIPI and CHMP-Tri models: the Relaxed Face and the Grooming Face were displayed more by chimpanzees higher on agreeableness, whereas the Compressed Lips Face was observed more in those individuals higher on boldness, and the Full Open Grin was displayed more by chimpanzees higher on extraversion but lower on emotional stability and conscientiousness. Facial expressions were also found to be associated with particular behavioural contexts, namely the Grooming Face in affiliative contexts and the Relaxed and Relaxed Open Mouth Faces in neutral contexts. Dominant chimpanzees display higher levels of boldness and more Compressed Lips Faces, Relaxed Open Mouth Faces, and Grooming Faces than subordinate individuals. These findings support and extend evidence for an honest signalling system and a personality structure shared between humans and chimpanzees. Future research could further explore how personality is conveyed through the face, perhaps through more than just singular aspects of character, and maybe reflecting what chimpanzees themselves are able to do.

In this brilliantly conceived volume, William Talbott takes aim at the ‘Proof Paradigm’, composed of five erroneous principles, which as he sees it has dominated Western epistemology since the ancient Greeks, and proposes to replace it with a superior alternative, one that involves on his part daring speculation about the metaphysical necessity of the principles of proper reasoning. One may at first glance be inclined to dismiss Talbott's project: Who now adheres to the Proof Paradigm, which, among other things, holds that knowledge is based on infallibly known premises and what is deduced from them? Does the book merely echo ‘battles long ago’? Talbott would reply that although strict adherence to the Proof Paradigm has gone by the boards, the efforts to replace it remain in the grip of some of its principles. Moreover, recognition of the Proof Paradigm's failure has led many people to embrace scepticism and relativism, a fact Talbott deems of deep concern. These challenges to knowledge lead to and exacerbate unfortunate trends in our society, in particular prejudiced thinking, the nature of which he explains with both care and passion in Chapter 7. Talbott discusses a vast number of issues in the book, and in what follows, I shall be able to comment on only a few of these.

Robert M. Adams has written a fairly short book, but into it he has packed a lifetime of rigorous analytic thought, and, what is rarer, deep insight into the nature of things. The book expands and recasts Gifford Lectures that Adams delivered in 1999, as well as other lectures and papers, and though it addresses difficult issues, Adams's clear style, retaining the informality of lectures, considerably eases the task of the reader; and the book is not without an occasional touch of humour, e.g. ‘As metaphysicians we may wish to assign a certain oomph to one side or the other in such lawgoverned relations; but it is not clear that the concept of oomph is at home in fundamental physics’ (p. 12).I cannot cover all the many and various topics in the book, but I shall endeavour in what follows to present a central thread of argument in it, the distinction between what is and what is in itself (the centrality of which is indicated by its presence in the book's title) and to show how this distinction leads to the theistic and idealist metaphysics to which the author is inclined.