Applied economics : an introductory course / edited by Alan Griffiths , Stuart Wall.

Previous ed.: 2001.Includes index and bibliographical references.xviii, 668 p. :Revised and updated every two years, 'Applied Economics' provides students with a unique combination of theory and application relating to real world experiences and events. It gives clear information on the major issues facing the British economy

The Modes of Descartes' First Meditation

The essay comments Descartes’ Meditations I. Starting from the suggestion that the ‘material’ modes of the Pyrrhonists can be distinguished from the ‘formal’ modes of the Academics, the text is read as a sequence of reasons for doubting whole sets of beliefs. These operations are ‘formal’ insofar as Descartes’ meditator recognises that he cannot enumerate one by one the members of these sets. First, he recalls how many beliefs he formed in infancy were erroneous, and identifies one source of error in their coming on the authority of others. He then notices that, even in favourable conditions, he could form false beliefs, for instance if he were suffering from persistent delusions. Favourable conditions cannot be delimited unless one knows one is not so suffering. Yet, sane people have dreams that resemble the delusions of the insane. On one reading of what a dream is, the beliefs threatened by the dreaming hypothesis include all those concerning the past. The final two phases of Meditations I, the deceiving God hypothesis and the evil demon hypothesis, raise the spectre of ‘transcendental scepticism’, outstripping Pyrrhonist and Academic scepticisms, but they resemble ‘formal’ modes because they supply reasons for doubting about entire sets of beliefs. While the deceiving God hypothesis is rejected on the basis of what is argued in Meditations III (that there is a veracious God), the same does not hold of the demon. But, even if the demon does exist, Descartes can intuit his own existence and thus overthrow transcendental scepticism

Eristic dialectic: the fencing master’s judgment

L’articolo esamina la nozione della dialettica eristica concepita come una sorta di scherma intellettuale, e presentata come tale da Schopenhauer nel manoscritto L’arte di ottenere ragione. Collocando l’arte della dialettica eristica rispetto ad altre arti e rispetto alla nozione di competizione, si enfatizzano i suoi rapporti con la pratica del duello. Il maestro di questa arte valuta il successo di una mossa dibattimentale non tanto con le regole della logica quanto alla luce della sua efficacia di mettere l’avversario in imbarazzo.The article examines how, in the manuscript that goes under the title Dialektik, Schopenhauer conceives of eristic dialectic as a sort of intellectual fencing. Locating this art relative to other arts and relative to the notion of competition, we seek to bring out its relations with the practice of duelling. The fencing master is one who evaluates debating moves with an eye not so much to logical rules as to their efficacy in putting the opponent on his back foot or in embarrassment

La recezione delle argomentazioni etiche di Eudosso di Cnido tra l’Accademia e il Liceo

The article expounds and examines the principal arguments that Aristotle attributes to Eudoxus of Cnidus in favour of the thesis that pleasure and the good are one and the same thing. Though Aristotle appropriates many of the key premises and inferential principles that underlie these arguments, he resists the hedonistic conclusion that Eudoxus draws

Nietzsche disintossicato: Temi e mitemi sulla verità negli scritti giovanili

Taking as a central text Friedrich Nietzsche’s brief polemic “On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche Disintossicato explores a range of questions in the theory of language and the theory of knowledge to which Nietzsche gives responses that have been very influential in humanistic culture over the last fifty or sixty years. Rather than offer a line-by-line commentary on the argumentation that Nietzsche deploys, the aim is to bring to the surface a sequence of ploys (“mythemes”) and to examine their functioning within the economy of the text. The overall goal of the essay is to resist (“detoxify”) some widespread misapprehensions about the notions of truth and meaning to which Nietzsche’s text gives voice. In particular, Nietzsche puts in play considerations that tend to highlight the alleged inadequacy of language to be a vehicle for the expression of truths. Instead, the title indicates that all we can hope for are “lies in the extramoral sense”, but Nietzsche nowhere explains what this phrase should mean and it is very hard indeed to make much sense of it as the core product of language use

Ragionare con persone

L’articolo indaga la nozione di ‘persona morale’ così come si è sviluppata a partire dalle riflessioni di Locke a Kant per poi arrivare all’esperimento mentale di Rawls riguardo alla ‘posizione orginale’, in cui si vede che ogni forma di sessismo e di razzismo risulta semplicemente improponibile come fondamento di una società giusta (sceglibile dietro al ‘Velo di Ignoranza’)