Two Varieties of Moral Exemplarism

References to moral exemplars run deep into the history of philosophy, as we find them featured in rather disparate context and approaches which span from virtue ethics to moral perfectionism, from existentialism to moral particularism. In the varied and growing contemporary literature on moral exemplarism, we find a number of options that can be brought down to the two rather broad yet distinctive categories of theoretical and anti-theoretical approaches. In the paper, I showcase and contrast these two varieties by taking the views of Zagzebski and Rorty as representative of, respectively, the reference to exemplars as most perfect beings to aspire to and get guidance from, and the use of them as next yet foreign beings to experiment with and get provocation from. Finally, I will draw some consequences for a conception of moral education hinged on unsettlement and transformation rather than on imitation and reproduction

Jamesian Liberalism and the Self

Despite he did not write any full-fledge and comprehensive treatise of the kind Thomas Jefferson, Walter Lippman, or John Rawls did, William James is among the great American liberal philosophers. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, and John Dewey and Richard Rorty after him, James was in fact highly skeptical of the opportunity of theorizing upon such matter – and much else –, mostly because of his wider distrust of top-down, idealized approaches in philosophical and political matters alike. As a consequence, and consistently with the pragmatist line he was part of, throughout his works we find a wealth of bottom-up, non-ideal insights about how to picture and exercise this particular option. In what follows I shall briefly present James’s distinctive understanding of liberalism, highlighting the two key features of it that in my opinion are still very much relevant for us today, placing them in some historical context: namely, the ethical feature of liberalism and its grounding in a conception of the self as contingent and mobil

Unfamiliar habits: James and the ethics and politics of self-experimentation

The article critically surveys William James's understanding of habit in the light of his wider ethical and political concerns, showcasing its import for a contemporary philosophical usage of the term

Players with limited memory

This paper studies a model of memory. The model takes into account that memory capacity is limited and imperfect. We study how agents with such memory limitations, who have very little information about their choice environment, play games. We introduce the notion of a Limited Memory Equilibrium (LME) and show that play converges to an LME in every generic normal form game. Our characterization of the set of LME suggests that players with limited memory do (weakly) better in games than in decision problems. We also show that agents can do quite well even with severely limited memory, although severe limitations tend to make them behave cautiously

A Single-Stage Approach to Anscombe and Aumann's Expected Utility

expected utility theory;decision analysis;revealed preference