Principal Claims Research Articles

Natural Beauty, Fine Art and the Relation between Them

Abstract: We defend three principal claims concerning natural beauty, artistic beauty and the relation between them. 1) Aesthetic pleasure in nature is typically and paradigmatically occasioned by the spatial form of natural kinds. 2) Breaking with a long-standing tradition, Kant claims that the presentation of such beautiful natural forms is not the end of the representational visual arts. Most art presents aesthetically the idea of humanity in our person. This is Kant’s Copernican revolution in the philosophy of fine art. 3) Although the representation of nature is not a sufficient condition of beauty in the representational visual arts, it is nonetheless a necessary condition of it.

Dynamic Evaluation Design

A principal owns a firm, hires an agent of uncertain productivity, and designs a dynamic policy for evaluating his performance. The agent observes ongoing evaluations and decides when to quit. When not quitting, the agent is paid a wage that is linear in his perceived productivity; the principal claims the residual performance. After quitting, the players secure fixed outside options. I show that equilibrium evaluation policies are Pareto efficient. In a minimally informative equilibrium, for a broad class of performance technologies, the agent's wage deterministically grows with tenure. My analysis suggests that endogenous performance evaluation plays an important role in shaping careers in organizations.

We Have a Consensus on Fraud on the Market - And It's Wrong

Recent scholarship overwhelmingly contends that the fraud on the market securities class action has neither deterrent nor compensatory effect and should be cut back or even abandoned entirely. This scholarship largely focuses on two critiques: circularity, which holds that shareholder class action claimants are suing themselves, making compensation impossible; and diversification, which holds that fraud constitutes a diversifiable risk, such that diversified shareholders both gain and lose from fraud in equal measure and hence are not negatively impacted. These critiques are arguably the most important and widely-used theoretical development of the last two decades in securities law, and enjoy a broad consensus. Unfortunately, these critiques are wrong. After tracing the evolution of these critiques, this paper demonstrates economically that, despite widespread acceptance, none of the principal claims of these critiques are correct. In particular: fraud on the market does indeed compensate defrauded purchasers despite circularity (under certain conditions, perfectly); and diversified investors do have expected losses from fraud and have incentives to undertake deadweight precaution costs. Further, the fraud on the market remedy deters both precaution costs and, under certain conditions, fraud itself. The critiques are fundamentally flawed, the academic consensus on fraud on the market is incorrect, and the panoply of reform proposals based on these critiques is without foundation. These critiques have fueled a trend of cutbacks and ongoing existential challenges to fraud on the market (as in Halliburton) that, in light of these results, should be rethought.

Água Viva, um salmo clariciano

This paper explores the resemblance between Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva (1973) and the Book of Psalms. There are two principal claims to be made on the basis of this comparison. First, by oblique reference to the biblical Psalms, Lispector provides us with a crucial tool for understanding her project in Agua Viva, namely the attempt to attain the intimacy, faith, and comprehension of herself, others, and existence as the Psalmist has of his God. Second, the intertextual relationship with the Old Testament may be taken as a Judaic trace in Lispector’s work, albeit one that the author employs not to emphasis her difference, but as a means of achieving communion with her readers, whoever they may be.

L'État développeur : défense du concept

Since financial crisis swept Asia in the late 1990s, many scholars have predicted the “decline” or “demise” of the region’s developmental states and called into question the ongoing utility of the developmental state idea. The present article thus begins with a survey of the principal claims put forward by these “declinists”, radical and moderate alike, with special reference to Korea, their favorite case study. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments allows one to present a conceptual defense of the developmental state. Without denying its institutional dimension, the latter is defined not in terms of a catalogue of policies and public institutions fixed in space and time but rather in terms of a collection of ideas embraced by the political elite concerning the role of the state in the techno-industrial transformation of the economy and the means of intervention. Adopting such a definition allows the concept of the developmental state to remain fully relevant, both in the case of Korea and more generally. ■

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber (review)

Vivek Chibber. Postcolonial Theory and Specter of Capital. London; Verso, 2013. Pp. xii, 306. US $29.95. The call of Subaltern Studies Project, formed by Ranajit Guha in 1982 and influenced by Marxist historical practice, to recover a bottom up historiography or from below has had an important influence postcolonial studies. In his Postcolonial Theory and Specter of Capital, Vivek Chibber recognises that [t]he truly innovative dimension of Subaltern Studies, then, was to marry popular history to analysis of colonial and postcolonial (6). Indeed, focus how individuals and groups on ground rather than their political and social elites have experienced capitalism has moved beyond India and other parts of South Asia to postcolonial world more broadly. Chibber opens with assertion that my central concern in this book is to examine framework that postcolonial studies has generated for historical analysis and, in particular, analysis of what was once called Third (5; emphasis in original). Taken as a whole, study argues that Subalternist theorists do not answer very question they raise--namely, how entry of capitalism into colonial world affected evolution of its cultural and political institutions (25). The first chapter sets out main argument of Postcolonial, which is that non-West should be conceptualised and understood through an application of same analysis and evaluation that is used to understand West. (I use terms the and the nonWest throughout this review because they are ones Chibber himself uses.) Chibber asserts: [i]nstead of being entirely different forms of society, West and non-West ... turn out to be variants of same species. Further, if they are indeed variations of same basic form, theories generated by European experience would not have to be overhauled or jettisoned, but simply modified. (23) Chibber draws and disputes works of Subaltern Studies theorists, primarily Ranajit Guhas Dominance without Hegemony (1997), Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000), and Partha Chaterjee's Nationalist Thought and Colonial World (1986). Although Subaltern Studies has been criticised since its establishment over thirty years ago, Postcolonial departs from existing treatments (20) of Subaltern Studies because the claims for a fundamental difference with reference to capital, power, and agency are all irredeemably flawed.... The main thrust of book, then, is to elucidate failure of arguments from difference, so central to postcolonial theory (22). As such, Chibber challenges what he perceives to be two principal claims of Subaltern Studies, claims widely accepted and deployed throughout postcolonial theory. First is claim of difference, idea that there are very profound disparities in culture, politics, and sociology of West and non-West during colonial and postcolonial periods. Second is critique of Eurocentrism, claim that theories originating from West complicate and confuse instead of illuminate non-West by conveying onto it models that are inaccurate and misleading. …

Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences

In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agentic capacities are recognised to be distributed across animate, and perhaps also inanimate, entities. The significance of this development for the political sciences is then explored. In a second part, I suggest that the new materialism entails a normative project. Here, ethical overtures towards a new sensitivity predicated on vital materialist insights are contrasted with a renewed critical theory. The latter is commended as a material reckoning of the 21st century: a project provisionally labelled a capacious historical materialism.

Commentary. Rights in the era of extraction policies

ABSTRACT This commentary by the president of a key Ecuadorian human rights organisation tells the story of civil society efforts to make Chevron-Texaco accountable for environmental destruction from its operations in that country. The author's three principal claims – that extractive industries are morally bankrupt and environmentally unsustainable; they violate human rights; and they violate the rights of nature enshrined in Ecuador's constitution – are sharpened by a critique of the rising “criminalization” of social protest. Broadening the discussion, he proposes sumak kawsay as an antidote not only to mining, but to a development model that privileges consumption over a life that balances human and environmental interests. Résumé Dans ce commentaire, le président d'une organisation équatorienne évoque les efforts de la société civile pour rendre la compagnie Texaco/Chevron responsable de la destruction environnementale causée par ses activités d'extraction dans ce pays. L'auteur constate que les industries d'extraction sont moralement corrompues; ne sont soutenable d'un point de vue environnemental; violent les droits humains; et violent les droits de la nature enchâssés dans la constitution équatorienne. Ses arguments sont renforcés par une critique de la criminalisation de la contestation sociale. Finalement, l'auteur approfondit la discussion en proposant le sumak kawsay comme une solution non seulement à l'extraction minière, mais aussi au modèle du développement qui place la consommation avant les intérêts humains et environnementaux.

Millennial Health Care: Change You Can Believe in

Millennial Health Care: Change You Can Believe in

Getting Emotional Over Contours: A Response to Seeley

Getting Emotional Over Contours: A Response to Seeley

A Revolution in Plato Scholarship

Catherine Zuckert's new book on Plato is a monumental work that should revolutionize Plato scholarship. I argue that its principal claims about ordering Plato's dialogues according to their dramatic chronology and about the development of Socrates in relation to Plato's other philosophers are highly plausible and powerfully presented. The book also makes the case for Socrates as “Plato's hero” whose greatness lies in understanding the human realm of the noble and the good independently of cosmology or metaphysics; and it challenges us to ask if Plato and Catherine Zuckert embrace this model of Socratic philosophy as the highest and happiest way of life.

Simon Werrett . Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2010. Pp. 359. $45.00.

Who would have thought that fireworks—spectacular displays designed to elicit fear, awe, admiration, and delight—occupied a central place in both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment? While it may not be surprising that the art of controlling explosions for visual effect drew on contemporary knowledge of chemistry (or alchemy) and mechanics, the principal claims of this ambitious book go much farther. Hunting down fireworks and fireworkers wherever he can find them, Simon Werrett sets out to uncover the complex of meanings, practices, and social identities populating a vast international pyrotechnic landscape, from a fifteenth-century German manuscript Feuerwerkbuch to the elaborate colored displays ignited to celebrate the marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte. To map what he calls the “geography of early modern art and science” (p. 135), Werrett trains his analytic gaze especially on three locations: London, Paris, and St. Petersburg. In the libraries and archives of each of these cities, abundant textual and visual evidence about centuries of fireworks underpins a comparative approach to the techniques, cultural meanings, audiences, and styles in the different kinds of displays mounted in the three capitals. The variety of venues is a great strength of the book, especially because it includes St. Petersburg, considerably less familiar in the history of science than London or Paris. Werrett started academic life as a scholar of science in Russia, and some of his most striking evidence comes from the images commemorating Russian spectacles, and from the archival sources that document the efforts of St. Petersburg academicians to use pyrotechnic experiments and expertise to enhance their status. The comparative framework of the book is only one element of a rather complex narrative, which tracks Italian fireworkers moving among European courts, tensions between gunners and architects, debates about theory and practice, and the intersection of performance and science in academies, courts, and public spaces.

Federalism and Health Care Reform: Understanding the States' Challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Currently, a total of twenty-eight states are challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in federal court. Their principal claims are that the PPACA's regulation of the states violates their independent sovereignty, and that the Act's minimum coverage requirement exceeds Congress's enumerated powers. This litigation is immensely important, as it concerns a hugely significant statute and raises fundamental questions of constitutional federalism. This article offers a detailed description of the claims raised by the states and analyzes their plausibility under current law. It then addresses the likelihood that the Supreme Court will ultimately sustain the states' arguments and invalidate the PPACA.

Realizing Carbon's Value: Discourse and Calculation in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

: This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost–benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.

Success or Selection? An Economic Perspective on Fisheries Co-Management

This paper comments on a recent paper published in the journal Nature that claims that fisheries co-management causes successful outcomes in fisheries. We outline theoretical arguments in favor of and against co-management as an approach to solving fisheries-commons problems. We argue that the principal claims of the authors are not supported by their data and analysis. Spurious inference about effectiveness of co-management runs the risk of undermining rather than advancing the policy process.

NORBERT ELIAS, THE CIVILIZING PROCESS: SOCIOGENETIC AND PSYCHOGENETIC INVESTIGATIONS—AN OVERVIEW AND ASSESSMENT

ABSTRACTNorbert Elias's The Civilizing Process, which was published in German in 1939 and first translated into English in two volumes in 1978 and 1982, is now widely regarded as one of the great works of twentieth‐century sociology. This work attempted to explain how Europeans came to think of themselves as more “civilized” than their forebears and neighboring societies. By analyzing books about manners that had been published between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, Elias observed changing conceptions of shame and embarrassment with respect to, among other things, bodily propriety and violence. To explain those developments, Elias examined the interplay among the rise of state monopolies of power, increasing levels of economic interconnectedness among people, and pressures to become attuned to others over greater distances that led to advances in identifying with others in the same society irrespective of social origins. Elias's analysis of the civilizing process was not confined, however, to explaining changing social bonds within separate societies. The investigation also focused on the division of Europe into sovereign states that were embroiled in struggles for power and security.This article provides an overview and analysis of Elias's principal claims in the light of growing interest in this seminal work in sociology. The analysis shows how Elias defended higher levels of synthesis in the social sciences to explain relations between “domestic” and “international” developments, and changes in social structure and in the emotional lives of modern people. Elias's investigation, which explained long‐term processes of development over several centuries, pointed to the limitations of inquiries that concentrate on short‐term intervals. Only by placing short‐term trends in long‐term perspective could sociologists understand contemporary developments. This article maintains that Elias's analysis of the civilizing process remains an exemplary study of long‐term developments in Western societies over the last five centuries.

Well-Behaved Women Don’t Make History: Rethinking Family, Law, and History

In this article, I focus on three principal claims. The first is that in the transition from the rules of coverture to the newly emerging family law of the 1858 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Court, the debilitating effects of coverture remained. Women were forced to conform to narrow roles of traditional passive womanhood, and the rights to civil divorce did not enable these nineteenth-century litigants to control their futures in any meaningful way. The second is that the issues and prejudices of the period naturally formed the core assumptions and relationships that continue to define family law. Because the focus in the nineteenth century was on the heterosexual couple, and control over their children and their property, the family law of today remains mired in that model. For that reason, such important “family” issues as health care, homelessness, child abuse, and a living wage are not considered central family law issues and the values of family law do not prevail in these areas. Instead, the model of fault, marital breach, and male rights in women’s chastity remain central despite the move to no-fault divorce and greater domestic rights. Third, historians and scholars have generally applauded the enterprise of family law as being good for women, as protecting their important interests in the domestic sphere, and as being liberalizing for women outside that sphere. I challenge this liberalization narrative for obscuring the role family law plays in the perpetuation of gender inequality and separate spheres. I argue that family law is not only not liberating, but it is constraining and limiting for women in the nineteenth century and today who wanted legal rights, rights that are the currency of the public sphere. My arguments are supported by extensive empirical data from my research into the 19th-century divorce court records.

Medical Travel—A Critical Assessment

This article critically assesses some of the principal claims made regarding the scope, direction, composition, structure, significance and social consequences of medical tourism, epitomized in the prevailing “master narrative,” which perceives the emergence of new medical hubs in the non-Western world primarily from the perspective of its significance for the crisis-ridden Western medical systems. “Medical travel” is suggested as a more adequate term to conceptualize the phenomenon than “medical tourism.” While recognizing that a reversal in the direction of medical travel has taken place, with growing numbers of Westerners travelling for treatment to non-Western medical hubs, the article stresses the often over-looked predominance of intra-regional medical travel within the non-Western world, as a leading factor in the formation of the new medical hubs. It claims that Western medical travellers to those hubs seek primarily cosmetic and other elective treatments, which have only a marginal impact upon the crisis in Western medical systems. The often problematic consequences of medical travel for the host countries are pointed out. The constraints on the integration of medical travel into Western medical systems, and on the emergence of global medical travel governance are discussed, and the prospects for the growth of medical travel are assessed.

The Informational Fabric of Eighteenth-Century India and the Middle East: Couriers, Intermediaries and Postal Communication

AbstractMundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the attention has been directed towards modern times and, for earlier periods, has been confined almost entirely to Europe, the western European empires and those sectors of the world's political economy in which Europeans had a stake. The rest of the world, in comparison, has been neglected, which may be seen clearly in the case of early modern India and the Middle East. This paper seeks to rectify the imbalance by offering a typology for making sense of how packages of low weight and high value were collected, transported and delivered over long distances within the region in the eighteenth century. While drawing on a wide range of sources, at the core of this analysis lies the correspondence of the headmen of a group—the Aiyangar pattamars—who specialised as couriers in pre-colonial southern India. Among the principal claims set forth are that there existed in this period two basic modes of private communication: in one, personal trust was paramount, in the other, the mode was effectively monopolised by recognised communities providing the necessary informational services within their cultural domain. These claims, if sustained, have major implications for current views on early modern India and the Middle East.

Dissecting the Torture Memos

Although the media are replete with contradictory allegations regarding the merit of the recently released torture memos, it is difficult to find a clear, concise analysis allowing for an independent evaluation. This very short piece (4 pages long) attempts to supply such an analysis of the memos' principal claims. It demonstrates the utter frivolity of the memos' legal reasoning, and concludes by suggesting that their authors' clear professional failures should result in sanctions for professional-ethics violations.