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10George Berkeley: a philosophical life (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (3): 557-561. 2023.The book under review here is a thorough and enlightening look at how Berkeley's life and philosophy intertwined. The fact that this review focuses on some points where I disagree with the author s...
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The Right to Walk AwayIn Aviezer Tucker & Gian Piero De Bellis (eds.), Panarchy: Political Theories of Non-Territorial States, Routledge. 2015.
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10The Understanding of Rationalism in C.S. Lewis and Michael Oakeshott: Tradition, Experience, and the Reading of Old BooksIn Eric S. Kos (ed.), Oakeshott’s Skepticism, Politics, and Aesthetics, Springer Verlag. pp. 89-110. 2021.C.S. Lewis was a major public intellectual in Britain, beginning from the late 1930s and continuing to his death in 1963. In both his non-fiction, especially The Abolition of Man, and his fiction, most importantly in That Hideous Strength, he offers a critique of rationalism and scientism that is often strikingly similar to those that Michael Oakeshott penned in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This essay examines the question to what extent this similarity is merely superficial, and to what exte…Read more
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14Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2020.This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or…Read more
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21Philosophy of nature (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (2): 396-399. 2018.
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7Oakeshott on Rome and AmericaImprint Academic. 2012.The political systems of the Roman Republic were based almost entirely on tradition, “the way of the ancestors”, rather than on a written constitution. While the founders of the American Republic looked to ancient Rome as a primary model for their enterprise, nevertheless, in line with the rationalist spirit of their age, the American founders attempted to create a rational set of rules that would guide the conduct of American politics, namely, the US Constitution.These two examples offer a stri…Read more
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34Is there a distinct and valid libertarian form of historical understanding?Journal of Libertarian Studies 22 (1): 294-308. 2010.
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206The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within the concept of disruption and adjustments. Further, many important cycle theories are true endogenous social cycle theories in which the theory provides a reason why the cycle should recur. We find that …Read more
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113Hans-Herman Hoppe's argumentation ethic: A critiqueJournal of Libertarian Studies 20 (2): 53-64. 2006.ONE OF THE MOST prominent theorists of anarcho-capitalism is Hans- Hermann Hoppe. In what is perhaps his most famous result, the argumentation ethic for libertarianism, he purports to establish an a priori defense of the justice of a social order based exclusively on pri- vate property. Hoppe claims that all participants in a debate must presuppose the libertarian principle that every person owns himself, since the principle underlies the very concept of argumentation. Some libertarians (e.g., R…Read more
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254Ideal Types and the Historical MethodCollingwood and British Idealism Studies 13 (1): 53-68. 2007.A number of social theorists have contended that the essence of historical analysis is the employment of ideal types to comprehend past goings-on. But, while acknowledging that the study of history through ideal types can yield genuine insight, we may still ask if it represents the full emancipation of historical understanding from other modes of conceiving the past. This paper follows Michael Oakeshott's work on the philosophy of history in arguing that explaining the historical past by means o…Read more
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1086Was Berkeley a Subjective Idealist?Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 21 (2): 157-184. 2015.Subjective idealism can be defined as the view that ‘the objective world independent of man does not exist; it is the product of man's subjective cognitive abilities, sensations, and perceptions’. George Berkeley often is said to be the founder of this species of idealism, and when someone wants to offer an example of a subjective idealist, Berkeley is usually the first person who comes to mind. However, those making this claim largely seem to be only passingly familiar with Berkeley’s work, som…Read more
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50The necessity of the a priori in scienceCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 18 (4): 417-429. 2006.Jeffrey Friedman has attempted to make a case for limiting state social engineering that is based on the skeptical epistemology of Sir Karl Popper. But Popper's epistemology is flawed, both in its rejection of a priori theorizing and its insistence on empirical falsification rather than confirmation. Classical liberalism of the sort that Friedman advocates requires, as its basis, positive knowledge of economics and social reality—not Popperian skepticism.
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33History is Not HistoricismCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 21 (4): 467-474. 2009.ABSTRACT Nassim Taleb’s dismissal of history as based on the “narrative fallacy”—which reads our present knowledge of past events into our reconstruction of the past—is based on a fundamental misconception of what historians actually do. Historians do not, as Taleb presumes, try to infer general, predictive laws from “hard” facts, as do natural scientists; instead their aim is to discover the causes of unique historical facts among antecedent facts. This is no different, in principle, from “narr…Read more
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75Liberty versus libertarianismPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 12 (1): 48-67. 2013.This paper aims to persuade its reader that libertarianism, at least in several of its varieties, is a species of the genus Michael Oakeshott referred to as ‘rationalism in politics’. I hope to demonstrate, employing the work of Oakeshott, as well as Aristotle and Onora O’Neill, how many libertarian theorists, who generally have a sincere and admirable commitment to personal liberty, have been led astray by the rationalist promise that we might be able to approach deductive certainty concerning …Read more
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46Is there a right to immigration?: A libertarian perspective (review)Human Rights Review 5 (1): 46-71. 2003.
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273Winch on Following a Rule: A Wittgensteinian Critique of OakeshottCollingwood and British Idealism Studies 18 (2): 167-175. 2012.Peter Winch famously critiqued Michael Oakeshott's view of human conduct. He argued that Oakeshott had missed the fact that truly human conduct is conduct that 'follows a rule.' This paper argues that, as is sometimes the case with Oakeshott, what seems, on the surface, to be a disagreement with another, somewhat compatible thinker about a matter of detail in some social theory in fact turns out to point to a deeper philosophical divide. In particular, I contend, Winch, as typical of those who o…Read more
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20History is Not HistoricismCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 21 (4): 467-474. 2009.ABSTRACT Nassim Taleb’s dismissal of history as based on the “narrative fallacy”—which reads our present knowledge of past events into our reconstruction of the past—is based on a fundamental misconception of what historians actually do. Historians do not, as Taleb presumes, try to infer general, predictive laws from “hard” facts, as do natural scientists; instead their aim is to discover the causes of unique historical facts among antecedent facts. This is no different, in principle, from “narr…Read more
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18Philosophy between the lines: the lost history of esoteric writing (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (6): 1214-1217. 2014.
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57Economics and Its ModesCollingwood and British Idealism Studies 14 (2): 128-157. 2008.Often different schools or styles of doing economics are seen as inevitably at odds with each other, so that one must be crowned 'correct' and the others vanquished as defective. However, if they actually represent alternative but potentially enlightening views of economic phenomena, then it will be foolish exclusively to pursue one approach at the expense of all others. This paper argues that the latter is a more accurate view of economics than is the former
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State University of New York (SUNY)Regular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |