Analyzing the statement “I intend to do X, although it is a mistake from every point of view” we can establish the relationship between reasons and intentions and reveal the absurdity of the statement. If we make the claim in the third person, or in the past tense (i.e. separate the speaker from the statement) [...]
How Bernard-Henri Levy fought his way into chronic interventionism by Christopher Caldwell Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so. Perhaps, Zéro speculated, it had to do with dual identity. There was Bernard-Henri [...]
by David Menconi Josh Knobe has comfortable seating in his philosophy department office at Yale University—a small couch somewhere between a love seat and a sofa in size. It is most decidedly not, however, an armchair, which might seem a trivial distinction. But in Knobe’s world, one’s position on armchairs can be a matter of [...]
by Stephen Metcalf When my daughters are ready for college, I’ll tell them a story they’ll scarcely believe: that when their father was first a graduate student, he attended a university where the most electric presence on campus was a philosopher. This will sound the same note of disbelief in them as sounded in me [...]
by Julie Sedivy, Ph.D. Corner offices. Tall and plush leather chairs. The swaggering gait and confident postures. Walk into an office environment, and it’s usually not hard to guess which people hold the positions of power, awarded the task of being the deciders. But do all these trimmings and reminders of the power hierarchy really [...]
by Michael H. Miller In 1909, after a six-day journey from Vienna with his associates Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York Harbor and spent a week sightseeing in the city. He had traveled to America to give a series of lectures on his “talking cure” at Clark University in Massachusetts. [...]
Do companies which try to do new things succeed and why? Phin Upham dicusses a seminal work on the topic In Diversification, Ricardian rents, and Tobin’s q, Cynthia A. Montgomery and Birger Wernerfelt present a study on the ability of a multimarket firm to diversify its resources (factors). Montgomery and Wernerfelt test whether a multimarket firm’s average [...]
We face a prolonged economic slowdown, high unemployment and financial pain. Phin Upham discusses some of the reasons. The current popular debate among the Federati in Washington and the Literati in newsprint is over whether the world will end in fire or ice – whether the US is headed toward hyperinflation or a continued downward spiral [...]
Prepared by The Harvard Review of Philosophy and edited by Phin Upham Harvey C. Mansfield is known as a political philosopher and as a scholar of past thinkers, including Burk, Machiavelli and Tocqueville. He is also renown among his academic colleagues, as well as his students, for challenging or adding sophistication to widely accepted assumptions. Though Mansfield [...]
Prepared by The Harvard Review of Philosophy and edited by Phin Upham While Michael Sandel is sympathetic to the liberal rights of the individual in his works, he goes on to argue that the existence of society precludes autonomous self-definition. His provocative disquisitions — e.g., “Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Liberalism” and the [...]