Now showing 1 - 10 of 33
  • Publication
    Feser on Rothbard as a philosopher
    (Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, 2009-08)
    In 'Rothbard as a philosopher' (Feser 2006) Edward Feser harshly criticises the philosophical abilities of Murray Rothbard. According to Feser, Rothbard seems unable to produce arguments that doesn't commit obvious fallacies or produces arguments that fail to address certain obvious objections. His criticism centres on what he regards as Rothbard's principal argument for the thesis of self-ownership. In this paper, I attempt to show that Feser's criticism fails of it purpose and that Rothbard is very far from being the epitome of philosophical ineptitude that Feser takes him to be.
      143
  • Publication
    Can You Own Yourself?
    (Addleton Academic, 2011-12)
    This article answers the title question in the affirmative. Self-ownership comes in two forms: one, negative, which denies that anyone else owns me; and the other, positive, which asserts that one has a right to dispose of oneself in any way that does not infringe on the like right of others. The notions of property, ownership and rights are explicated in ways that make the self-ownership thesis coherent and defensible. It is concluded that the positive right of self-ownership entails that one may voluntarily enslave oneself.
      258
  • Publication
    The inescapability of ethics
    (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013-06)
    As a philosophical theory, as contrasted with a theological view or an assumption of popular science or an emotional intuition about fate, determinism fails because it is unstateable. However far we impinge (for instance for legal or moral purposes) upon the area of free will we cannot philosophically exhibit a situation in which, instead of shifting, it vanishes. The phenomena of rationality and morality are involved in the very attempt to banish them.
      249
  • Publication
    Teaching Philosophy to the Gifted Young
    (Sage, 2009-09)
    This paper begins by raising the question of whether we should introduce philosophy to the gifted young. Having sketched some of the problems associated with such an introduction, the paper proposes some procedures to make such an introduction possible with as little pain as possible and makes some concrete suggestions to enhance the experience of the philosophical neophyte.
      447Scopus© Citations 2
  • Publication
    An Elementary Grammar of Rights and the Law
    (Addleton Academic, 2010-12)
    Rights are many and diverse. They are jural rather than material entities that subsist in a society of rational beings and relate essentially to property, in the limiting case, one’s property in oneself. Law is the product of social evolution and exists to vindicate rights. The conditions for the emergence of law are embodiment, scarcity, rationality and sociability. The context for the emergence of law is dispute resolution. The characteristics of such a customarily evolved law are its severely limited scope, its negativity, and its horizontality. A legal system (or systems) based on the principles of customarily evolved law could answer the needs of social order, namely, the vindication of rights, without permitting the paternalistic interferences with liberty characteristic of contemporary legal systems.
      203
  • Publication
    Why chickens have no myths: Walker Percy on language and man
    (Veritas, 2013-07)
    It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it….1 Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from his troubled dreams and found that while he had not been metamorphosed into a giant insect—what a story that would have made!—he had been transplanted from his comfortable bed to the floor of what looked like a rain forest. All around him were trees, or what looked like trees, with strange shapes and unrecognisable foliage. The tree-like things stretched up to the sky—and what a sky! Purple instead of the normal blue and, as Gregor saw when he reached a clearing, with not one but what looked like two suns! Wherever Gregor was, it wasn’t Earth; it wasn’t even Prague. The forest was raucous with sounds—an Amazonian cacophony of whistles, shrieks and jabberings. Suspended between terror and exhilaration, Gregor began to explore his new environment. First things first—what would he eat and drink? Was he in danger from attack by plants or animals? How would he know what was a plant or an animal? Were there human beings on this planet or, if not human beings, then rational beings of some kind or other? How would he know if there were any such beings on this planet?
      351
  • Publication
    Where Does Law Come From?
    (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2010-12)
    Law, like language, is the product of social evolution, embodied in custom. The conditions for the emergence of law embodiment, scarcity, rationality, relatedness and plurality are outlined, and the context for the emergence of law dispute resolution is analysed. Adjudication procedures, rules and enforcement mechanisms, the elements of law, emerge from this context. The characteristics of such a customarily evolved law are its severely limited scope, its negativity, and its horizontality. It is suggested that a legal system (or systems) based on the principles of archaic law could answer the needs of social order without permitting the paternalistic interferences with liberty characteristic of contemporary legal systems.
      333
  • Publication
    Born alive: the legal status of the unborn child in England and the U.S.A.
    (Barry Rose Law Publishers, 2005-05)
    This work ex­plores the philosophical underpinnings of the law of homicide via an historical, thematic, logical and philosophical analysis of the anomalous legal status of the unborn child in the two major common-law jurisdictions, England & Wales and the USA. The book describes a trajectory from a consideration of the history and social embodiment of a particular rule of the criminal law to a broader and more reflective philosophical and jurisprudential discussion of the questions that it raises for the law and for society as a whole.
      2398
  • Publication
    The Computational Metaphor and Cognitive Psychology
    (Taylor & Francis, 1989-10) ;
    The past three decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of research interest in the mind. This trend has been acclaimed as the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology. At the heart of this revolution lies the claim that the mind is a computational system. The purpose of this paper is both to elucidate this claim and to evaluate its implications for cognitive psychology. The nature and scope of cognitive psychology and cognitive science are outlined, the principal assumptions underlying the information processing approach to cognition are summarised and the nature of artificial intelligence and its relationship to cognitive science are explored. The ‘computational metaphor’ of mind is examined and both the theoretical and methodological issues which it raises for cognitive psychology are considered. Finally, the nature and significance of ‘connectionism’— the latest paradigm in cognitive science—are briefly reviewed.
    Scopus© Citations 6  1350
  • Publication
    Angelic Interiority
    (Irish Philosophical Journal, 1989-06)
      235