Articles by Kevin Vallier

The editors over at the Cato Unbound blog are hosting a symposium on Jerry Gaus’s version of public reason liberalism. Jerry provides a lead essay. Three commenters have response essays. Readers of the blog will know the first two commenters, philosophers Richard Arneson and Eric Mack. The third is Peter Boettke, an economist at George Mason University who blogs at Coordination Problem. All four pieces are thought-provoking and will be of great interest to Public Reason Blog readers. Jerry will add a concluding response essay in a few days. Cato Unbound welcomes discussions at other blogs, so if anyone wants to discuss some of the issued raised in the symposium on this blog, Cato Unbound will link to it.

Here are links to the main essays, with summaries included:

Jerry’s Essay: The Range of Justice (or, How to Retrieve Liberal Sectual Tolerance)

Summary: In his lead essay, Gerald Gaus argues that today’s political philosophy is a confused jumble of opposing factions with little prospect of consensus. He then proposes a way out of this “crisis of credibility”: We should recognize that there may be a range of institutions, each of which suffices to win our assent given the benefits that accrue from agreeing to any of them. Just as liberalism is a response to religious sectarianism, it can also be a response to philosophical sectarianism.

Dick Arneson’s Essay:  Toleration and Fundamentalism: Comments on Gaus

Summary: Richard Arneson rejects the analogy between religious and political toleration. In the latter, we are called to exercise reason, and we may well be justified in excluding from consideration those who hold unreasonable views. Indeed, given fully rational and fully informed interlocutors, agreement is inevitable, and there is no need for toleration at all. Gaus’s argument, while clever, is flawed. Arneson founds toleration on consequentialism: We tolerate even unreasonable beliefs because persecuting them has obviously bad results.

Eric Mack’s Essay: Peter Pan Strikes Back

Summary: Eric Mack argues that while classical liberalism seems to be a part of Gaus’s “range of justice,” its focus on prohibiting certain methods of attaining one’s goals will always render it unacceptable to some members of society. For all that, the prohibition of certain means, with very few restrictions on individuals’ chosen ends, makes the classical liberal position distinct from many other mere political sects. As a further problem, focusing on a range of justice whose member theories can potentially be found agreeable by free and equal moral persons may simply push the whole question back to a deeper level: Who then gets a place at the public reason table with the grownups? Are those agents who don’t come to the public reason table subject to any of the principles of justice?

Pete Boettke’s Essay: Living Better Together

Summary: Peter J. Boettke likens Gaus’s argument to the work of Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan in political economy and public choice. He argues that property rights are integral to any generalized liberal system; without them, and without the means of increasing economic wealth through the market process, society will devolve into a fight over resources. Private property is thus a part of the basic framework of any liberal society.

Jason Brennan (Georgetown) and I (Bowling Green) have put together a conversation on public reason/political liberalism and its treatment of religious contributions to public life (which would not have been possible without the help of the great folks over at Phil TV, especially David Killoren). In the video, I argue that there are relatively unexplored versions of public reason that are considerably friendlier to religious contributions to public life than public reason’s proponents and detractors believe. Jason presents me with a number of sharp challenges and observations.

Watch us here.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

The Bowling Green Workshop in Applied
Ethics and Public Policy

Manipulation

March 16-17, 2012

The Bowling Green Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy will take place in Bowling Green, Ohio on March 16-17, 2012. The keynote speaker will be Marcia Baron (Indiana University).

Those interested in presenting a paper are invited to submit a 2-3 page abstract (double-spaced) by September 30, 2011. We welcome submissions in all areas in applied ethics and philosophical issues relevant to public policy. Special consideration will be given to papers relevant to this year’s conference theme: manipulation. The theme is to be construed broadly, however, and we encourage contributions from any area of moral and political philosophy where manipulation is of interest or concern.

Only one submission per person is permitted. Abstracts will be evaluated by a program committee and decisions made in October 2011. Please direct all abstracts and queries to:
pibarra@bgsu.edu

Further information about the Workshop will be available on the workshop website:

http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/phil/conferences/manipulation

We reach the end of the book. It has been a long-haul and I am grateful to everyone who has been involved. I’m going to use this post to achieve two aims: (a) to summarize the main themes of the book in light of Jerry’s emphases in the conclusion and (b) to discuss the novelties explored in Appendix A.

Discussion and Review

The very first sentence of the Conclusion is illustrative: “The philosopher’s stone that transforms individual goal pursuit into social restraints on goal pursuit is, like other alchemical projects, enticing but misguided” (547). Let’s reflect for a moment on why Gaus begins the conclusion of this 550-page book in this way. Wasn’t this point merely one of many made along the way? Isn’t this just part of the point of the book?

I. Hayek and the Social Contract Tradition

I suggest that if we take Jerry at his word, we can shed light on the deepest themes in the book. First, note that this claim in effect rejects the entire basis of the social contract tradition, a tradition one might easily think that Jerry is defending and extending rather than rejecting. In some sense, Jerry rejects the contract metaphor. The idea that our interest in social morality can ground our reasons to follow social-moral rules (the idea that arguably lies at the heart of the contractarian tradition) must be rejected; and Jerry has tried to show why at great length. Instead, we must adopt an entirely distinct philosophical anthropology, one that is at root deeply Hayekian, for as Jerry says, “Our reason did not produce social order - we did not reason ourselves into being followers of social rules. Rather, the requirements of social order shaped our reason.” This just is Hayek, who wrote:

Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in a society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations (LLL, 11).

Many of you know Hayek the classical liberal, but Jerry is following Hayek the social theorist, who attempted to integrate the rationality of rule-following into his philosophical anthropology at the deepest level. Jerry has argued throughout the book that the conception of the person employed within public reason liberalism and liberalism broadly speaking must move in this Hayekian direction. If public reason liberals follow Jerry’s lead, the fundamental structure of public reason and even the nature of the social contract theorists’ project must substantially change. In short, political justification must not begin with deriving the rationality of rule-following from a teleological conception of practical reason. Instead, it must begin with an understanding of the nature of human beings who are already rule-followers and the nature of the moral emotions and cooperative activities that accompany such rule-following. It is in this way that Jerry moves most forcefully away from Hobbesian conceptions of public reason. He goes further by arguing that even the Kantian conception of the person he endorses cannot be constructed out of practical reason alone. Instead, human nature contains Kantian elements for thoroughly Humean-Hayekian-evolution reasons. Our rule-following nature is contingent on our social development (though no less contingent than our goal-seeking nature).

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OPR attempts to show how moral authority can is possible despite disagreement among free and equal persons about the nature of morality. To do so, we must determine what moral authority is and the challenges it raises.

Section 2 might be read as an explanation of the various notions of freedom at work in the book. The first idea that Gaus analyzes is the “presumptive” or “natural” freedom in the state of nature. On this “negative” conception of freedom, X is free when X is free from requirements to comply with the judgments of others about morality. Notice that this is not freedom from morality but freedom that obtains when one is free from the others’ varying interpretations of morality.

Gaus ties his conception of freedom to the Kantian notion of autonomy and to what Susan Wolf calls Kant’s “Reason View” where one is autonomous when she has the option to act in accord with reason. For Gaus, “a free moral person is one who acts according to her own reasoning about the demands of morality.” (15).

A justified moral order rejects the claims of natural or self-appointed authority of some over others. When citizens make unjustified demands, those that do not appeal to the reason of citizens, they are “authoritarian”. (16). For Gaus, authoritarianism is the original sin of political philosophy. The authoritarian is not only morally suspect but fails to establish authoritative claims over her compatriots, since she appeals only to her own reasons, not to others’. For Gaus, for John to treat Reba as a free and equal moral person means that he must “acknowledge a fundamental constraint on the justification of claims to moral authority over her.” (17). The political philosopher must dispel the suspicion that morality is a form of illegitimate social control to explain how such moral authority can be justified.

Gaus next introduces a contrast between two conceptions of free and equal moral persons and their connection to social morality. Gaus ascribes to prominent Kantians Tim Scanlon and Stephen Darwall what he calls the “Expansive View” where we recognize others as free and equal means by “act[ing] toward others according to principles they could not reasonably reject.” Gaus takes Darwall and Scanlon to hold that “recognizing others as free and equal immediately implies [emphasis mine] a formula for what actions are morally permissible.” Yet the Expansive View is unattractive because it loads too much of the content of morality into a conceptual claim about the nature of recognizing others as free and equal. The Expansive View is therefore too controversial to form the foundation of a justification for social morality under conditions of reasonable pluralism.

The “Restrictive View” is an alternative to the Expansive View. It holds that moral personhood “consists in the capacity to care for moral rules in such a way that one recognizes a compelling reason to abide by the rule even when such conformity does not promote one’s wants, ends, or goals.” (19). Gaus believe that he can demonstrate that the Restrictive View is an implicit part of our social practices and so is presupposed by participation in any extended system of social cooperation. Notice that Gaus endorses the Expansive View (p. 20) but that he thinks it is vital to publicly justify the Expansive View in light of the Restrictive View.

Gaus introduces two puzzles about morality authority in Section 2.3. The ideas of freedom from judgment, natural moral personhood and equality among persons raise the Puzzle of the Assertion of Authority over an Equal. The puzzle concerns not speech acts but “claims to authority over another.” The puzzle is this: How can moral equals show that they have the authority to demand that others conform to certain social rules? The second puzzle is the Puzzle of Mutual Authority which arises because all persons have the ability to acquire authority over each other despite their equality. Gaus thinks that Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all thought the puzzles could be solved. On their view, authority among equals must be possible in order to resolve conflicts of private judgment.

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Section 1 has a simple aim: to introduce Gaus’s distinctive concept of “social morality” and to describe its central features. Social morality is “the basic framework for a cooperative and mutually beneficial social life” and “provides rules that we are required to act upon and which provide the basis for authoritative demands of one person addressed to another.” The authority relation is fleshed out in detail in Section 2. In this post, I will proceed by enumerating the core features of Gausian social morality.

Social Morality, the Definition:

Social morality is “the set of social-moral rules that require or prohibit action, and so grounds moral imperatives that we direct to each other to engage in, or refrain from, certain lines of conduct” (2).

Notice that Gaus emphasizes that he is not talking about the whole domain of the normative. Instead, his focus is on a particular kind of normativity, one that involves socially practiced demands and imperatives.

Social Morality, Feature #1: Coordination and Cooperation

An essential feature of social morality is that it serves a social function; it “has its roots in this requirement of social life.” The rules of social morality “structure social interaction.” Gaus emphasizes that social morality must have the practical function of making us better off: “certainly one of the things morality must do is allow us to live together in cooperative, mutually beneficial, social relations.” (4).

Social Morality, Feature #2: Extension and Restraint of Our Aims

The “Baier-Strawson” view of social morality is that social morality is a set of rules that allow us to live well together and that require our obedience. Social morality is contrasted with personal values or “individual ideals.” Social morality is comprised of rules that both “provide the conditions for the successful pursuit of these ideals” but also “simultaneously constrain our choices about how to pursue them.” (6).

Social Morality, Feature #3: Not Instrumental

Gaus will focus on this feature in Chapter 2 but he notes here that if we admit that social morality “has a job to perform” that we must ask whether it is merely a tool that we use for our benefit. Gaus thinks not. Instead, he will argue that we have independent reason to follow moral rules other than its coordinating function.

Social Morality, Feature #4: Imperatival

Social morality provides “the basis for issuing demands on others that they must perform certain actions.” Gaus contrasts this view of modern social morality with an ancient, Aristotelian teleological account of morality that understands moral rules in terms of the ends they promote. Setting aside the matter of whether Larmore and Sidgwick (mentioned in the book) have the history right (I suspect they don’t), the contrast is still useful: Gaus will argue that our reasons to follow social morality are not to promote our ends. This is the point of Chapter 2 and it crucial for the argument of the book.

Social Morality, Feature #5: Prescriptive (Though also Descriptive)

For Gaus, social-moral rules have a prescriptive function. They have their home in our social practices. Gaus is clear to emphasize that he rejects the simple contrast between descriptivist and prescriptivist accounts of the semantics of moral statements. Instead, following R.M. Hare, he claims that many moral statements have both elements. This key feature of social morality makes social morality a social phenomenon. In other words, part (though not all) of the essence of social-moral rules is that they are used to control others. We use moral rules to tell each other what to do. Morality, furthermore, makes “my action your business” because it assigns standing to you to make demands of me.

A critic might reply that the authority of morality is distinct from the authority of those who interpret it. But Gaus follows Hobbes and Kant in pointing out the fact that morality does not “fax its demands from above” but is instead often unclear. People disagree about what absolute or True morality consists in. As will become clear, social morality is a method of resolving disputes about what the True morality is. However, social morality’s claims must have authority that all can recognize despite their disagreements about what Morality-with-a-capital-M is. If social morality cannot ground authority despite disagreement about ultimate normativity then our social practices cannot be authoritative despite disagreement. The authority of social morality in a diverse world becomes impossible. But surely, Gaus suggests, this cannot be true.

Social Morality, Feature #6: Deference in Private Judgment

The sixth feature of social morality is that it is constituted by claims of moral authority, but moral authority understood as “a claim to deference in judgment.” In its most fundamental mode, moral authority is the authority to demand that others follow your interpretation of Morality-with-a-capital-M. Moral authority “qua moral power” (the Hohfeldian incident of a power-right) is important but this form authority is downstream from moral authority as a claim to deference in judgment.

Social Morality, Feature #7: Non-Ontological

Gaus throws away a brief line that he follows Hare in “putting aside ontological issues about the nature of morality.” It is interesting to speculate on what this might mean. In short, I think Gaus thinks that his hybrid view of social-moral statements is compatible with a range of plausible views of the metaphysics of social morality. In other words, it is compatible with a range of views about truth-makers for moral claims (or something close to this).

In sum: social morality is the set of moral rules that:

(1) Coordinate our actions and help us to cooperate;
(2) Extend and restrain our aims;
(3) Are followed for non-instrumental reasons;
(4) Consist of imperatives issued in social interaction;
(5) Are essentially prescriptive;
(6) Command deference in private judgment;
(7) Can be characterized somewhat independently of claims about moral metaphysics;

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The Order of Public Reason opens with concerns about how contemporary political philosophy is practiced. Gaus argues that political philosophers artificially divide up core questions in order to make their jobs easier. Instead, they miss vital connections between these questions. When Gaus says he is a “fox” in the fox-and-hedgehog-sense, you may want to laugh (I chuckled) but I take Gaus to mean that his method is highly eclectic in contrast to the methods of most political philosophers. One point of OPR is to show how a more holistic and comprehensive method pays off.Despite his foxy method, Gaus is explicit that OPR aims to answer a single, hedgehog’s question:

Can the authority of social morality be reconciled with our status as free and equal moral persons in a world characterized by deep and pervasive yet reasonable disagreements about the standards by which to evaluate the justifiability of claims to moral authority? (xv)

This question seems clear on its face, but in fact as we make our way through the book, it will become clear that the question refers to ideas that Gaus develops in great detail, including “authority”, “social morality”, “free and equal moral persons”, “reasonable disagreements” and “the justifiability of claims”. Nonetheless, it should be clear to the reader that Gaus intends to use a “Foxy” method to answer a Hedgehog’s question. And in fact, this is arguably the central question of political philosophy from the perspective of the social contract tradition. Gaus conceives of his project as an attempt to answer the classical asked by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls, and yet he thinks their questions cannot be answered without reference to philosophers and social theorists from very different traditions, like David Hume, Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek.

The preface provides us with a clear statement of how Gaus understands morality as a set of distinct domains of normative analysis. It is crucial to see at the outset that Gaus is focused on what he calls social morality. It is a bit like Tim Scanlon’s “what we owe to each other” morality, the set of social rules and practices by which we make moral demands of one another. Gaus sees social morality as essentially constituted by prescriptions about what others to do. He worries that morality can be authoritarian, that is, social morality can consist in an unjustified set of social practices of ostracism, arbitrary domination, and the like. A social order cleansed of authoritarianism, whose social morality is justified to all, is “an order of public reason.” Remember Gaus’s words: “Morality does not directly speak to us; it is other people who speak to us, asserting their views of morality as demands that we act as they see fit.”

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This post is intended to serve as a reference point for all posts relating to our reading group on Jerry Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason. Below you will find our reading schedule and discussant list. We are going to cover two sections a week for thirteen weeks. The book is long, but at this pace, you’ll only have about thirty to fifty pages of reading each week. Each discussant will cover one or two sections.

I propose that we structure the posts in the following way, though others are free to diverge from my recommendations. First, each section should have its own post that will be linked through this one as a reference point. I suggest that each post be neatly divided into an expository part and a critical part. My own preference is to summarize the section in under 1000 words and then raise 500 words of criticisms. It would also be good to structure the criticism in ways that make the section amenable to discussion. Think of questions that not only concern you but that might concern others. In constructing my own contributions, I’ve found the book so rich and deep that an adequate exposition takes long enough and suggests enough of its own questions to where exposition may be sufficient to get good discussion off the ground, so I think it is fine to simply raise your own questions and criticisms in the comments.

Discussions in the comments should be largely focused on the topics raised by that particular section, though of course the sections are all deeply interwoven. If the discussion branches off into several topics, I suggest either placing a brief heading on your comment or, if the subject warrants further discussion, creating your own post on the matter.

I’m going to title my posts “OPR: Ch.I, The Fundamental Problem, Sec.1, Social Morality” and then “OPR: Ch.I.2, Moral Authority among Free and Equal Persons”. Posts title should err on the side of brevity. Jerry has not made this easy on us, but by using abbreviations for repeated text, I think we can make due.

I think we should post the first section of each week on Monday morning and the second on Wednesday morning in order to give us time to focus in on one particular section. There is so much going on in each section that we will have plenty to talk about.

Please note that if you still need a sample copy, email me at kevinvallier-at-gmail-dot-com.

Ok, with that, we’re off. Here’s the schedule:

OPR Reading Group

Chapter I: The Fundamental Problem

January 17th: Preface and Section 1, Social Morality (Kevin Vallier)
January 19th: Section 2, Moral Authority among Free and Equal Persons (Kevin Vallier)
January 24th: Section 3, Evaluative Diversity and the Problem of Indeterminacy (Jonathan Quong)

Part One: Social Order and Social Morality

Chapter II: The Failure of Instrumentalism

January 26th: Section 4, The Instrumentalist Approach to Social Order (Jonathan Quong)
January 31st: Section 5, Revisionist Theories (Peter Vanderschraaf)
February 2nd: Section 6, Orthodox Instrumentalism (Peter Vanderschraaf)

Chapter III: Social Morality as the Sphere of Rules

February 7th: Section 7, The Evolution of Rule-Following Punishers (Jason Brennan)
February 9th, Section 8, Deontic Reasoning (Jason Brennan)
February 14th, Section 9, The Rationality of Following Rules (Ian Ward)
February 16th, Section 10, Moral Rules as Social Rules (Ian Ward)

Chapter IV: Emotion and Reason in Social Morality

February 21st: Section 11, Moral Demands and Moral Emotions (Keith Hankins)
February 23rd: Section 12, Moral Emotions and Moral Autonomy (Keith Hankins)
February 28th: Section 13, The Reasons One Has (John Thrasher) (Part 2)

Part Two: Real Public Reason

Chapter V: The Justificatory Problem and the Deliberative Model

March 7th: Section 14, On Modeling Public Justification (Andrew Lister) (Part 2) (Part 3)
March 14th: Section 15, Proposals (Micah Schwartzman)
March 16th: Section 16, Evaluating Proposals and the Problem of Indeterminacy (Micah Schwartzman)

Chapter VI: The Rights of the Moderns

March 21st: Section 17, Arguments from Abstraction and the Claims of Agency (Blain Neufeld)
March 28th: Section 18, Jurisdictional Rights (John Thrasher)

Chapter VII: Moral Equilibrium and Moral Freedom

March 30th: Section 19, Coordinating on a Morality (Colin Bird)
April 4th: Section 20, The Evolution of Morality (Thomas Porter)
April 6th: Section 21, The Testing Conception (Thomas Porter)

Chapter VIII: The Moral and Political Orders

April 11th: Section 22, The Authority of the State (Peter Stone)
April 13th: Section 23, The Justification of Coercive Laws (Peter Stone)
April 18th: Section 24, Private Property and the Redistributive State (Christopher Morris)
April 20th: Section 25, Further Functions of the State and Practical Paretianism (Christopher Morris)
April 25th: Concluding Remarks on Moral Freedom and Moral Theory (Kevin Vallier)
April 27th: Appendix A, The Plurality of Morality (Kevin Vallier)

This post is an announcement that our spring reading group on Gerald Gaus’s new The Order of Public Reason reading group begins a week from today on January 17th. We have a number of fabulous contributors who will take on various sections of the book, not only providing a brief summary of the reading, but their own thoughts and criticisms of the text. Among our committed contributors (those who have spoken with me since the new year about the reading group) are Christopher Morris, Micah Schwartzman, Jonathan Quong, Jason Brennan, Thomas Porter, Blain Neufeld, Kevin Gray, and Ian Ward. Others who have expressed interest should contact me soon.

Cambridge University Press summarizes The Order of Public Reason (OPR) as follows: “Gerald Gaus shows how we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyses social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.”

We welcome all contributors to the Public Reason blog as discussants. For those of you who have not joined up, let this reading group be a reason for you to do so. We’re also happy to have as many readers as we can. I want to state here that you will find that OPR is quite expensive. You can compare prices for the book here. However, if you cannot afford to buy the book, do not let this discourage you from participating. Sample copies are available. Just email me at kevinvallier-at-gmail-dot-com and I will be more than happy to provide you with a sample until you can purchase the book for yourself.

I will post the first entry next Monday. We will be reading the preface, and the first two sections of Chapter 1. The first two sections are a total of 36 pages. The text is quite engaging and provocative. I am sure you will enjoy it.

You can find the schedule and links to the posts on each section here.

For those of you who do not know, Cambridge is about to publish Jerry Gaus’s new book, The Order of Public Reason. It will be out in hardback by the first of next year. Here’s a general description of the book:

In this innovative and important work, Gerald Gaus advances a revised, and more realistic, account of public reason liberalism, showing how, in the midst of fundamental disagreement about values and moral beliefs, we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyzes social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.

Given the orientation of the blog, I suspect the book will be of interest. Would anyone be interested in running a reading group here?

Hi everyone. My name is Kevin Vallier. I’m a fourth year graduate student at the University of Arizona. My primary work is in political philosophy, but I have strong interests in ethics, philosophy of economics and philosophy of religion. I’m currently writing my dissertation. In short, I’m attempting to give a justificatory liberal account of the role of religion in politics. The article I’m reading to you in many ways form the template for my dissertation.

I of course wrote this article with my dissertation advisor and world-class political philosopher Jerry Gaus. The article was originally an invitation to Jerry to write an article that would be part of a symposium on public reason and religion in Philosophy and Social Criticism. Jerry and I had been talking about these issues for nearly a year, so he was magnanimous enough to invite me to be a co-author.

The article I’m reading to you today has the incredibly unwieldy title: “The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity: The Implications of Convergence, Asymmetry, and Political Institutions.” I place the blame for this title squarely on Jerry’s shoulders. The delightful and razor-sharp John Quong will be our commenter. Thank you, John for your able criticisms.

I read the entire paper on the podcast, but I don’t read the footnotes. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll want to see the footnotes in the paper if you had additional questions.

With that said, thank you all for joining me and thanks to Simon May for putting together this very cool, very hip, very innovative and yes, very cheap philosophy conference.

Here’s the PDF.

Here are Jon Quong’s excellent comments.

I’ll post replies on Monday and Tuesday.

Incidentally, we’re hoping to get Jerry in on this, but he will be at a conference over the weekend going on about T. H. Green. (What? You don’t know who T. H. Green is? Well, you should!) I will pester him, but posting provocative comments will help draw him in!

The podcast is below. Enjoy my melodious Southern accent. The file is large (~6 MB) so patience while loading. Its probably better to download it to your computer or MP3 player.

 

 Three Errors: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Note: Please do not cite this article without permission from the authors.