Newport--Those were the days

It is a great misfortune that our military schools should be established in connection with the watering places characterized ... in scenes of social dis­play and dissipation. Surely the students will be wasted ... on the giddy maidens who disport themselves on the rocks in sun bonnets! These were the words of Congressman William McAdoo as he described the relationship between New­port and the Naval War College in 1892. In 1974, though giddy maidens no longer wear sunbonnets and the social display is less conspicuous, Newport still offers a wide variety of entertain­ment and cultural activities for the family and enterprising bachelor

Thomas Hobbes: Os textos introdutórios da sua tradução de História da Guerra do Peloponeso, de Tucídides

Translation: Thomas Hobbes: The introductory texts of his translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War by ThucydidesTraduacão da obra: Thomas Hobbes: Os textos introdutórios da sua tradução de História da Guerra do Peloponeso, de Tucídide

Team reasoning and intentional cooperation for mutual benefit

This paper proposes a concept of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit. This concept uses a form of team reasoning in which team members aim to achieve common interests, rather than maximising a common utility function, and in which team reasoners can coordinate their behaviour by following pre-existing practices. I argue that a market transaction can express intentions for mutually beneficial cooperation even if, extensionally, participation in the transaction promotes each party’s self-interest

The fables of pity: Rousseau, Mandeville and the animal-fable

Copyright @ 2012 Edinburgh University PressPrompted by Derrida’s work on the animal-fable in eighteenth-century debates about political power, this article examines the role played by the fiction of the animal in thinking of pity as either a natural virtue (in Rousseau’s Second Discourse) or as a natural passion (in Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees). The war of fables between Rousseau and Mandeville – and their hostile reception by Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith – reinforce that the animal-fable illustrates not so much the proper of man as the possibilities and limitations of a moral philosophy that is unable to address the political realities of the state