Inquiry, understanding, and the value of philosophy

The Concepts of Unjust Enrichment

Unlike other areas of the private law, the law of unjust enrichment stands or falls with the theory upon which it is based.This theory, fashioned primarily by Peter Birks and continued by many other scholars is known as the ‘dominant model’. The model employs a number of crucial concepts such as enrichment, benefit, value, and injustice. Unfortunately, the model has no coherent understanding of these things. Instead, it equivocates over the meanings of these concepts and at times adopts strange and even absurd understandings of them. It has to do this, because the model does not work. The dominant model is a failure. After revealing this, the book goes on to demonstrate how a more constrained and humble law of unjust enrichment might emerge from the wreckage of the dominant model. As scholarly doubts around the dominant model increase, this thought-provoking revision of unjust enrichment is both welcome and needed.

REENCHANTMENT, INEFFABILITY, AND “THE DIALECTIC OF NOMINALISM”

Martin Jay's newest book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph , aims to reveal the presence of a third current of thought in modern thinking. This current, which he calls “magical nominalism,” does not fit the traditional dichotomies (voluntarism–determinism, subjectivism–realism, and so on) around which the field's prevailing narratives are organized. As he shows, magical nominalism participates in the process of destroying the Scholastic idea of a perfectly ordered cosmos (an idea that was initiated by nominalism in the fourteenth century) but introduces into the nominalist matrix of thought a reference to an ontological dimension of reality that was initially absent from it. However, as he insists, magical nominalism does not constitute a homogeneous current. This form of thinking resists definition in unequivocal terms. Studying it therefore requires an approach that is capable of articulating a plurality of views.

Aspect–Seeing, Facts of Nature, and Jazz Improvisation

The contribution of this essay to two rather distinct academic literatures is two-fold. First, it reconceives the significance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect–seeing, which are generally taken to be revelatory of language narrowly conceived, and instead explores the connection between aspect–seeing—what Wittgenstein identifies as one “among the concepts of experience”—and the nature of experience itself. It does so by noting the importance to Wittgenstein of inventing “fictitious natural history” to reveal the connection between what we say and the kind of creature we are. It then examines other fictitious natural histories involving aspect–seeing (or its absence) that illustrate some “very general facts of nature”—facts that, the essay contends, help form the fundamental conditions for our finding one another intelligible. Second, the essay reconceives what constitutes the significance of jazz improvisation (and possibly other forms of spontaneous activity, though those are not explored here) by grounding this significance in these same very general facts of nature. It develops this thought by considering the implications of a different fictitious natural history involving musical performance, and through a remarkable if complex instance of an exemplary improvised jazz solo by Charlie Parker.

Doing, Knowing, and Getting it Right

Representationalists view thought and language as mirrors of a mind-independent world. On this view, knowing is about accurately representing reality, and meaning lies in representational content. This book offers a pragmatist alternative: it argues that our practices are not just relevant but fundamental to both knowing and meaning—and that knowing-how should be seen as the primary form of knowledge. Building on neopragmatist tradition and engaging with classical pragmatism as well as recent work in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science, the book develops and defends methodologism. This novel framework reorients questions of knowledge and meaning around rule-guided rational practices. The book will appeal to students and scholars in these fields, as well as readers across the humanities and social sciences interested in language, rationality, and their role in communities.

and Plato

King Lear and the Wonder of the Meaning of Life

Abstract:This article builds upon an Aristotelian view of poetic tragedy to make two main points. First, a nihilistic interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear misunderstands Shakespeare’s intention of interweaving two plots into one play—the pessimistic story of King Lear and the optimistic story of Edgar. Because the play does not end with the murders of Lear’s daughters and with his own grieving death but with the appointing of Edgar to be the king who had been primed throughout the play for that moment, the play teaches a profound lesson—moral order survives moral chaos. Second, because moral order and moral chaos are evident in the play and in our lives, nihilism is an unsatisfactory explanation of the human experience. Rather, a metaphysic similar to the implied metaphysic of the play (that is, the Chain of Being) better explains our experiences because it can account for both moral order and moral chaos.