Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi

A discussion of the economic work of Genovesi, the first professor of political economy in Europe. Genovesi supports a physiocratic theory of value as the net produce of agricultural work; a theory of interest as the motive of human action, intermediate between the extreme poles of excessive self-love and benevolence; a doctrine of innate rights as a limit to the sovereign's action; a commercial policy that limits dependence on foreign countries. He also took a position in the eighteenth-century debate on "luxury", taking a firm stance in favour of moderate luxury, considered not vice but virtue as the right means between excessive parsimony and prodigality. He also discusses the function of the classes not dedicated to "mechanical arts" and not producing "rents" but nevertheless useful to society (Adam Smith's "unproductive" workers) in which he includes the proprietary classes which he defends against Rousseau's radical criticism, limiting himself to advocating the abolition of inalienable properties. Finally, he advocates population growth as a way to increase public happiness, the development of agriculture, the freedom of grain trade and the interest rate.

Galiani discusses a subject much debated in the eighteenth century, namely, the nature of the currency. He also includes considerations of economic theory and political philosophy around the main motif. He supports the following theses of monetary theory: currency has the function of a sort of register of credits that every individual can have towards the warehouses of goods of which the society is supplied, and precisely in the measure of the contribution he has given to their supply; the metallic currency has the merit, with respect to a hypothetical system of artificial accounting, to be safe from frauds and not to require a bureaucratic apparatus; the value of currency depends on the value of metals, not on legislative interventions.

A discussion of 'Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation', a collection of 18 essays by Davidson already published since 1964. The first key idea of the book is the notion of 'radical interpretation', based on the semantic conception of truth, which contrasts with Frege's and the early Wittgenstein's conception of meaning, and is an extension of Quine's notion of radical translation. The second idea is the critique of the distinction between empirical content and the conceptual scheme that organizes it, a distinction that lies at the basis of relativism for which different languages organize the world in different ways; the distinction itself is but a third dogma of empiricism, which has survived the eradication therapy implemented by Quine against the two dogmas of analytical/synthetic distinction and reductionism. The third idea is the "principle of charity". The fourth is the critique of Max Black's theory of metaphor as interaction.

In the essays collected here, Apel addresses some of the points of the discourse ethics controversy by responding to critics and developing his original formulation in different directions: a) the distinction between two stages of discourse ethics, relating respectively to the ideal community of communication and the real community; in the second stage, while maintaining the principle of equal dignity of communication partners as a regulatory idea, deontological ethics should be integrated with an ethics of responsibility; b) placing a deontological ethics as a post-conventional ethics within an evolutionary reconstruction of individual development and the history of humankind in the light of Gehlen's anthropology and Kohlberg's psychological theory of moral development; c) a recognition of a certain validity in the neo-Hegelian claim of the ineliminable role of morality or Sittlichkeit in the face of all universalistic ethics, accompanied, however, by the characterization of ethics as a compromise between universalistic instances and concrete cultural and institutional data, without any concession, yet, to the thesis of incommensurability between different forms of life.