Phil Anderson's Magnetic Ideas in Science

In Philip W. Anderson's research, magnetism has always played a special role, providing a prism through which other more complex forms of collective behavior and broken symmetry could be examined. I discuss his work on magnetism from the 1950s, where his early work on antiferromagnetism led to the pseudospin treatment of superconductivity - to the 70s and 80s, highlighting his contribution to the physics of local magnetic moments. Phil's interest in the mechanism of moment formation, and screening evolved into the modern theory of the Kondo effect and heavy fermions.Comment: References fully hypertexed with live links to historic papers. "PWA90: A Lifetime of Emergence", editors P. Chandra, P. Coleman, G. Kotliar, P. Ong, D. Stein and C. Yu, pp 187-213, World Scientific (2016

Social Morality in Mill

A leading classical utilitarian, John Stuart Mill is an unlikely contributor to the public reason tradition in political philosophy. To hold that social rules or political institutions are justified by their contribution to overall happiness is to deny that they are justified by their being the object of consensus or convergence among all those holding qualified moral or political viewpoints. In this chapter, I explore the surprising ways in which Mill nevertheless works to accommodate the problems and insights of the public reason tradition, and the extent to which he makes arguments that can help those working within that tradition. Mill’s utilitarian theory incorporates the claim that the demands of social life require a publicly accepted set of normative expectations to govern judgments about when one has met one’s obligations and, relatedly, about the appropriateness of blame or punishment

Mill, John Stuart

This draft entry is an overview of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on his views on religion, for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell)

John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice

My aim in this chapter is to place John Stuart Mill’s distinctive utilitarian political philosophy in the context of the debate about luck, responsibility, and equality. I hope it will reveal the extent to which his utilitarianism provides a helpful framework for synthesizing the competing claims of luck and relational egalitarianism. I attempt to show that when Mill’s distributive justice commitments are not decided by direct appeal to overall happiness, they are guided by three main public principles: an impartiality principle, a sufficiency principle, and a merit principle. The question then becomes how luck and relational considerations figure into his articulation of these public principles. I argue that relational egalitarianism is more fundamental than considerations of luck and responsibility in Mill’s thought, but I also hope to show that any fleshed out picture of Mill’s reform proposals must recognize his condemnation of the role luck plays in determining the distribution of opportunities and outcomes

The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill

My aim in this chapter is to push back against the tendency to emphasize Mill’s break from Bentham rather than his debt to him. Mill made important advances on Bentham’s views, but I believe there remains a shared core to their thinking—over and above their commitment to the principle of utility itself—that has been underappreciated. Essentially, I believe that the structure of Mill’s utilitarian thought owes a great debt to Bentham even if he filled in that structure with a richer conception of human nature and developed it in more liberal directions. This commonality is revealed, in particular, in Mill’s own institutional designs and practical reform proposals in Considerations on Representative Government and related writings. If this is right, then the tendency of interpreters to highlight their differences rather than their similarities has been to the detriment of both Mill and Bentham scholarship, and so to our understanding of the rise of liberal utilitarianism

More Democracy Is Not Better Democracy: Cain's Case for Reform Pluralism

This article is part of a symposium on Bruce Cain's "Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary." It identifies the basic normative framework of Cain's skeptical "reform pluralism" as a form of democratic instrumentalism rather than political realism, and then argues that a more optimistic instrumentalist alternative is available. The instrumentalist can accept that more democracy need not entail better democracy. But the instrumentalist account of better democracy also gives us reason to believe that significant reform efforts remain worth pursuing, for the simple reason that some of them have worked in the past

The symplectic-N t-J model and s±_\pm superconductors

The possible discovery of $s_\pm$ superconducting gaps in the moderately correlated iron-based superconductors has raised the question of how to properly treat $s_\pm$ gaps in strongly correlated superconductors. Unlike the d-wave cuprates, the Coulomb repulsion does not vanish by symmetry, and a careful treatment is essential. Thus far, only the weak correlation approaches have included this Coulomb pseudopotential, so here we introduce a symplectic N treatment of the t-J model that incorporates the strong Coulomb repulsion through the complete elimination of on-site pairing. Through a proper extension of time-reversal symmetry to the large N limit, symplectic-N is the first superconducting large N solution of the t-J model. For d-wave superconductors, the previous uncontrolled mean field solutions are reproduced, while for $s_\pm$ superconductors, the SU(2) constraint enforcing single occupancy acts as a pair chemical potential adjusting the location of the gap nodes. This adjustment can capture the wide variety of gaps proposed for the iron based superconductors: line and point nodes, as well as two different, but related full gaps on different Fermi surfaces.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure