2,545 research outputs found
ADAM SMITH'S OPTIMISTIC TELEOLOGICAL VIEW OF HISTORY
No full textAdam Smith's four-stage theory provides the framework for his writings on history. The fourth stage is the commercial epoch; the culmination of history in this stage is a key component in the conventional interpretation of Adam Smith as a prophet of commercialism. In two historical case studies Smith shows the capacity of commercial society to regenerate itself. This potent capacity suggests that commercial society is inevitable. At a certain point in time it also overcomes the major obstacles to its permanence. Smith's philosophy of history anticipates the end of history views of Kant and Hegel.Political Economy,
ADAM SMITH'S VIEW OF HISTORY: CONSISTENT OR PARADOXICAL?
No full textThe conventional interpretation of Adam Smith is that he is a prophet of commercialism. The liberal capitalist reading of Smith is consistent with the view that history culminates in commercial society. The first part of the article develops this optimistic interpretation of Smith's view of history. Smith implies that commercial society is the end of history because 1) it supplies the ends of nature that he identifies; 2) it is inevitable; and 3) it is permanent. The second part of the article shows that Smith has some dark moments in his writings where he seems to reject completely such teleological notions. In this more civic humanist mood he confesses that commercial society does not supply the ends of nature, nor is it inevitable, nor is it permanent. Both views exist in Smith and the commentator is forced to choose between passages in Smith's work in order to support a particular interpretation of the former's view of history.Political Economy,
Adam Smith and Roman Servitudes
No full textThis essay is a preprint of an article that appeared at: Tijdschrift voor Rechstsgeschiedenis, 72 (2004), 327–57.This essay discusses Adam Smith historical jurisprudence and his use of Roman law materials in his Lectures on Jurisprudence. It argues that Smith found it difficult to maintain his theory of legal development in the face of a highly developed body of Roman law literature
THE THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF ADAM SMITH'S WORK
No full textThe paper will discuss the theological foundation to Smith's writings. Teleology, final causes and divine design were initially seen as central to understanding Smith's writings. Over time, this view fell out of fashion. In the period after World War II, with the rise of positivism, commentators tended to overlook or downplay this interpretation. In the last decade, or so, teleology has started to be restored to its former position as an essential element in understanding Smith. After spelling out Smith's teleology and his view of final causes, divine design and the ends of nature, we try to explain the Panglossian nature of the 'new theistic view' of Smith. While our view differs somewhat, we agree with the essence of the 'new view' claim: a theological view exists in Smith which underpins his moral and economic theories.Political Economy,
Religiosity and trust: evidence from the United States
No full textTrust is one of the key driving forces behind human action and an important factor in shaping human interaction. The purpose of this article is to the effect of measure several indicators of religiosity, including an index for both social and individual religiosity, on trust. We use the US General Social Survey (GSS, 1972-2018, n > 10k) to investigate the relationship between religiosity and trust (interpersonal and generalized). The results demonstrate that while social religiosity or belonging (services attendance, church membership) predicts more trust, individual religiosity or believing (prayer, closeness and belief in God) predicts lower trust. Ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation theory explains our findings—connecting with God disrupts connection with humans. Indeed, respondents who claimed to believe in God display higher levels of misanthropy. We show that it is important to consider individual and social religiosity simultaneously because they correlate and have opposite effects.Peer reviewe
Adam Nicolson's 2023 Book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, and Walter J. Ong's Thought
No full textSee the above abstract.In my deeply retrospective 4,215-word review essay "Adam Nicolson's 2023 Book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, and Walter J. Ong's Thought," I selectively highlight the prolific English author Adam Nicolson's 2023 book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I situate his work in the larger conceptual framework of the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) -- and the extensive related work of numerous other scholars, including the philosopher Eric Voegelin and the classicist Eric A. Havelock.N/AFarrell, Thomas. (2023). Adam Nicolson's 2023 Book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, and Walter J. Ong's Thought. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/257886
Inertial acoustic cloaks made from three acoustic fluids
No full textThis thesis provides an extensive review of acoustic wave theory in one, two (polar), and three (spherical) dimensions concluding with a study of passive, non-directional cloaking. The optical theorem is derived by use of energy conservation, yielding the cross sectional scattering in two and three dimensions. A new method, the Matricant Propagator, is developed for solving the scattered pressure field in wave-object interactions. Solutions found from the Matricant Propagator method are compared with known solutions using the Global Matrix method. A review of acoustic cloaking literature is given, including numerical comparison with previously proposed cloaking models. Lastly an acoustic cloak of the inertial type, made from compressible, inviscid fluids, is proposed by layering concentric shells of only three distinct fluids. The effectiveness of the device depends upon the relative densities and compressibilities of the three fluids. Optimal results are obtained if one fluid has density equal to the background fluid, while the other two densities are much greater and much less than the background. Numerical examples display a significant reduction in scattering and were compared using multiple solution methods. It is found that use of only two unique fluids is too restrictive for cloaking, however, interesting characteristics are found where energy may be diverted such that a reduction in backscatter occurs.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Adam Julius Nag
The Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge Across Time and Space: Evidence from Professional Transitions for the Superstars of Medicine
No full textAre scientific knowledge flows embodied in individuals, or "in the air"? To answer this question, we measure the effect of labor mobility in a sample of 9,483 elite academic life scientists on the citation trajectories associated with individual articles (resp. patents) published (resp. granted) before the scientist moved to a new institution. We find that article-to-article citations from the scientific community at the superstar's origin location are barely affected by their departure. In contrast, article-to-patent citations, and especially patent-to-patent citations, decline at the origin location following a star's departure, suggesting that spillovers from academia to industry are not completely disembodied. We also find that article-to-article citations at the superstar's destination location markedly increase after they move. Our results suggest that, to be realized, knowledge flows to industry may require more face-to-face interaction than those to academics. Moreover, to the extent that academic scientists do not internalize the effect of their location decisions on the circulation of ideas, our results raise the intriguing possibility that barriers to labor mobility in academic science limit the recombination of individual bits of knowledge, resulting in a suboptimal rate of scientific exploration.
Efficient, Compositional, Order-Sensitive n-gram Embeddings
No full text<p>This is the companion data for the paper, `"Efficient, Compositional, Order-Sensitive n-gram Embeddings, Adam Poliak, Pushpendre Rastogi, M. Patrick Martin, Benjamin Van Durme, EACL(2017).` For more details see https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~apoliak1/papers/ECO--EACL-2017.pdf</p>
<p> </p>
<p>@inproceedings{Poliak:2017EACL,<br>
Title = {Efficient, Compositional, Order-sensitive n-gram Embeddings},<br>
Author = {Poliak, Adam and Rastogi, Pushpendre and Martin, M. Patrick and Van Durme, Benjamin},<br>
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},<br>
Year = {2017},<br>
Publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},<br>
location = {Valencia, Spain}<br>
}</p>
<p>This data contains individual skip-embeddings created and the English Wikipedia data used to generate the embeddings.</p>
<p>dim100_c10.tar.gz is missing the skip-embeddings 3 positions to the right of a given word. They can be downloaded from http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~apoliak1/data/eco/cocoon.mincount~5.dim~100.window~3.dim_divide~10.embeds.gz</p>
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