As is well-understood, the postwar economy, has gone through two major phases. During the long boom between the end of the 1940s and the early 1970s, most of the advanced capitalist economies (outside the United States and the United Kingdom) experienced record-breaking rates of investment, output, productivity, and wage growth, along with low unemployment and only brief and mild recessions. Bu...

This essay replies to critics since 1995 of my "biostatistical theory" (BST) of health. According to the BST, a pathological condition is a state of statistically species-subnormal biological part-functional ability, relative to sex and age. Theoretical health, the total absence of pathological conditions, is then a value-free scientific notion. Recent critics offer a mixture of old and new obj...

Code critics are a recommendation facility of the Pharo Smalltalk IDE. They signal controversial implementation choices such as code smells at class and method level. They aim to promote the use of good and standard coding idioms for increased performance or a better use of object-oriented constructs. This paper studies relations among code critics by analyzing co-occurrences of code critics de...

We are grateful to José Bermúdez and to Andrea Cristiano Pierno, Caterina Ansuini and Umberto Castiello for reading and criticizing our book. They offer us an opportunity to clarify some of our views. Bermúdez discusses aspects of our version of the two-visual systems model of human vision bearing on the separation between the content of visuomotor representations and the content of visual perc...

One of the central moral challenges facing numerous political communities today is political reconciliation. In the aftermath of repression, conflict, and injustice, communities confront the task of repairing damaged relationships among citizens and between citizens and officials. In A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation, I develop a theory of what this process entails and of its moral sig...

Tessman responds to her three critics’ comments on Burdened Virtues, focusing on their concerns with her stipulation of an “inclusivity requirement,” according to which one cannot be said to flourish without contributing to the flourishing of an inclusive collectivity. Tessman identifies a naturalized approach to ethics—which she distinguishes from the naturalism she implicitly endorsed in Burd...

In my reply to critics I address a raft of issues raised by the commentators to Fault Lines of Globalization. These issues include: the radicalization of the Husserlian concept of intentionality as differance; the irreducibility of a-legality to (il)legality; the relation between legal orders and society; legal pluralism; the relation between power and place; contingency and modernity; fear and...

Few methodological issues are more stubborn than the status of rational choice theory (henceforth, RCT): the debates surrounding it are approximately five decades old with no end in sight. Fifty years are a long time not only in the life of any human being but also in the progress of a discipline so it is remarkable that the discussion is not closer to a conclusion now than what it was at its i...

We present Policy Gradient Actor-Critic (PGAC), a new model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) method for creating limited-memory stochastic policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) that require long-term memories of past observations and actions. The approach involves estimating a policy gradient for an Actor through a Policy Gradient Critic which evaluates probabilit...

D Pereboom’s Living Without Free Will (2001) is an outstanding book that rightly changed the debate over an ancient problem. I am certain that Free Will Skepticism, Agency, and Meaning in Life will join the first book as a must-read for anyone in the world interested in these foundational issues. The main pillars of the account remain, including incompatibilism between free will and determinism...