Human clinical research has become a huge economic enterprise (Morin et al. 2002; Noah 2002). Because the human subject at the center can be so easily marginalized, many commentators recommend spec...

This book provides an in-depth analysis of Thomas Hobbes's philosophy and political writings. The author argues that Hobbes was not only a philosopher, but also a publicist who played an important role in shaping political discourse in his time. This is an essential resource for anyone interested in political philosophy and the history of ideas. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work (...) is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions (and included extensive discussion of a third). In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the (...) most critical questions and considering whether the answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

This chapter examines Marianne Weber’s reflections on the separability between thought and personality. While this question has become an important aspect of Max Weber’s reception history, Marianne Weber did not pose it as a historiographical or biographical problem but rather in the context of her work as a leader of the bourgeois German women’s movement. Retracing her response to Georg Simmel’s views on women’s contribution to what he called objective culture, the chapter shows how Marianne Weber turned a striving for (...) objectified detachment from the personal into a practical life task for the women of her generation. In its normative function for individual lives, it was a task comparable to the duties that Max Weber posited for the life of the scholar, grounded in his methodological notion of objectivity. (shrink)

The portentous terms and phrases associated with the first decades of the Frankfurt School--exile, the dominance of capitalism, fascism - seem as salient today as they were in early 20th-century. The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School addresses the many early concerns of critical theory and brings those concerns into direct engagement with our shared world today. In this volume, a distinguished group of international scholars from a variety of disciplines revisit the philosophical and political contributions of Theodor W. Adorno, (...) Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others. Throughout, the Companion's focus is on the major ideas that have made the Frankfurt School such a consequential and enduring movement. It offers a crucial resource for those who are trying to make sense of the global and cultural crisis that has now seized our contemporary world. (shrink)

Brief survey of Charles Taylor's earlier books, followed by an extensive review of Taylor's A Secular Age, published 2007 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

George Karamanolis breaks new ground in the study of later ancient philosophy by examining the interplay of the two main schools of thought, Platonism and Aristotelianism, from the first century BC to the third century AD. Arguing against prevailing scholarly assumption, he argues that the Platonists turned to Aristotle only in order to elucidate Plato's doctrines and to reconstruct Plato's philosophy, and that they did not hesitate to criticize Aristotle when judging him to be at odds with Plato. Karamanolis (...) offers much food for thought to ancient philosophers and classicists. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)