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Casey, Gerard
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Casey, Gerard
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Casey, Gerard
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 33
- PublicationCan You Own Yourself?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.
261 - PublicationFeser on Rothbard as a philosopherIn '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.
149 - PublicationSeeing ourselves as others see us: The place of reason in Adam Smith's theory of moral sentimentsIn making a feeling or sentiment such as sympathy foundational to his ethical analysis Adam Smith appears to set himself on a collision course with those ethical theories in which reason plays a central role. I shall claim, contrary to appearances, that reason has an important part to play in Smith’s final account of ethics; that what Smith rejects when he appears to reject reason, is a kind of austere ultrarationalism (a la Cudworth, Plato or the Stoics) that would make reason the original independent source of our ethical judgements; and that, in the end, Smith does not reject reason but rather develops a complex theory of morality which permits reason to play a significant role in man’s moral life.
201 - PublicationThe Contemporary University and its Cultured DespisersOnce upon a time, not so long ago, there were no universities. You could travel wherever your fancy took you and stumble upon kings and courts, soldiers, churches (some with little schools attached), towns, merchants, farmers, in fact, all manner of things- but no universities. Then, in a very short period of time and in different places - Paris, Bologna, Oxford- and no one knows quite how or why, the university appeared; chaotically, anarchically, without any grand plan or design, with its subsequent organisation by authorities merely tidying up a pre-existent emergent order (see Knowles 1962).
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