Orthodox Account Research Articles

The Rise of modern philosophy: the tension between the new and traditional philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz

'Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or 'modern' philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies have more in common than the orthodox account suggests. In two survey articles and thirteen essays on individual philosophers, the contributors show that the rise of modern philosophy was much more complicated and much more interesting than is usually thought. They consider not only metaphysics and the sciences but also claims of Machievelli, Hobbes and Spinoza to have invented 'modern' ethics and politics. These two aspects of 'modernity' in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant.

TOWARDS THE SOCIALIST COMMONWEALTH? COOPERATION IN LEICESTER IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

AbstractThe history of cooperation and working-class politics in the period after 1850 have generally been treated as separate topics by historians. The two movements are usually depicted as embarking upon different paths after their unity during the Owenite and Chartist period of the 1830s and 1840s. Retailing and the dividend, following the Rochdale system, began to dominate the world of cooperation after 1850 and connections are rarely discerned between the cooperative world and the Socialist revival of the 1880s and 1890s. Evidence from Leicester, however, questions this orthodox account. Not only did Socialism and cooperation begin to appear on the same agenda but the type of cooperation which attracted Socialist attention and briefly flourished in the town was the old pre-Rochdale form of producers' cooperatives. This study will attempt to explain the renewed interest in workers' cooperatives, the connections with the infant Socialist movement and the factors which halted this interesting development.

The ‘unacceptable face’ of the West European Upper Palaeolithic

More than a century ago the publications of Gdouard Lartet laid the foundations for the nomenclature and stratigraphy of the French Upper Palaeolithic. Academic debate arising from Lartet's work continued until the 1930s by which time the framework and classification of the period were fixed. They have remained fairly static ever since. Indeed, the French system appeared unimpeachable, so that scholars strove to apply it, unchanged, to widely differing areas. Since the 1930s most work on the French sequence has been designed to confirm the results of old and 'untrustworthy' excavations, and to shore up an original framework with additional information. The situation is much the same for the way of life of palaeolithic man: the standard textbook description of savage hunters eking a living from a harsh environment was in vogue for a very long time, and one might be forgiven for believing that this hypothesis had always been dominant; this is not the case. It is little-known fact in this country that during the latter part of the nineteenth century there were major arguments in academic circles concerning the way of life in the Palaeolithic, and in particular the question of domestication during that period. Were it not for the demise of Piette and the subsequent dominance of Breuil, it is possible that the present orthodox account of the Upper Palaeolithic might be very different

Distribution Costing

The apparent failure on the part of companies to evolve a satisfactory costing scheme for their physical distribution (PD) systems is now giving way before a sustained attempt to rationalise PD costs. The author reviews the legislative and economic changes which have led to a recognition of the need for change, and he suggests that the “Total Distribution” (TD) approach to a solution is the one to be explored. The distinctive nature of the different accounting schemes in use, and their informational requirements, are discussed. The complex nature of PD involves the use of both operational research and statistical techniques. In fact, the need for improved information for PD management is not yet being met, and this hampers decision‐making. The monograph looks at the shortfalls in financial accounting for PD, and at the complex and ambiguous relations between PD and the formal company financial statement. Finally, the profit‐analysis approach may be the answer, and this can be incorporated within the framework of a missions approach. The author concludes that, so far, neither orthodox accounting procedures nor experimental approaches have yet provided a complete answer for PD cost analysis.

An Orthodox Statistical Resolution of the Paradox of Confirmation

Several authors, e.g. Patrick Suppes and I. J. Good, have recently argued that the paradox of confirmation can be resolved within the developing subjective Bayesian account of inductive reasoning. The aim of this paper is to show that the paradox can also be resolved by the rival orthodox account of hypothesis testing currently employed by most statisticians and scientists. The key to the orthodox statistical resolution is the rejection of a generalized version of Hempel's instantiation condition, namely, the condition that a PQ is inductively relevant to the hypothesis (x)(Px ⊃ Qx) even in the absence of all further information. Though their reasons differ, it turns out that Bayesian and orthodox statisticians agree that this condition lies at the heart of the paradox.

Financial Reporting for Conglomerates: An Economic Analysis

A recent proposal by the Secunties and Exchange Commission would require conglomerate companies to issue income statements on a divisional basis. Evaluating this proposal, the authors indicate that, although this form of reporting is feasible in the case of the pure conglomerate, it may be difficult in a case involving substantial interdivisional relationships and jointly used corporate capacities. They argue that the highly diversified firm must optimize the use of scarce economic capacities (resources) used jointly by its various divisions; orthodox accounting statements are not designed to reveal the results of this planning procedure. The dual of the linear programming problem is utilized in order to determine internal (shadow) prices of the jointly used corporate resources in such a way that goals and preferences of the overall corporate management center are realized.

Aristotle and the XΩΡΙΣΜΟΣ of Plato

‘All the difficulties in the theory of forms arise from their separation.’ This recurrent criticism of Aristotle's is, of course, one of the principal obstacles in the way of any reconstruction of the Platonic metaphysic. To begin with, it is flatly denied by Plato himself in the use of such words as μέθεξις, παρoυσία and κoινωνία. It must also be rejected by the orthodox account of the Forms which takes them to be immanent, constitutive principles in the world of everyday life, like a Law of Nature or the Concrete Universal of Hegel. Finally, modern philosophy has made it clear that this view of universals is right and necessary if thought and language are to exist, and it is therefore tempting to attribute it to Plato.