One difference between economists and geographers is the significance attached by the former to stylized facts and the very different significance attached by the latter to the diversity of economic life. The paper begins with this distinction and argues that Krugman's theory-enslaved stylized facts may impoverish theoretical innovation in economic geography just as the efficient-markets hypothesis has had severe consequences for research in finance. An alternative to theory-enslaved stylized facts is suggested, noting the inevitable and antagonistic relationship between theory and empirical observation. My philosophical perspective is neither foundational nor postmodern, but is, rather, a version of philosophical skepticism. Having reviewed recent developments in economic geography, the claimed virtues of objectivity and the supposed dangers of subjectivity are disputed. I suggest that the former is compromised by its reliance upon a ready-made world, while the dangers of the latter are exaggerated by an implied commitment to an uncontested truth. This is the basis for arguing the virtues of close dialogue in economic geography and in the geography of finance in particular.

Stylized Facts and Close Dialogue: Methodology in Economic Geography

▪ Abstract This review describes a paradigmatic shift in anthropological studies of human movement, from an observationist view of behavior to a conception of body movement as dynamically embodied action. After outlining the scope of such study, historical and cultural reasons for the relative neglect of body movement in anthropological enquiry are examined critically and placed in the wider context of recent social and cultural theorizing about the body and the problem of dynamic embodiment. A historical overview situates earlier approaches, such as kinesics and proxemics, in relation to more recent developments in theory and method, such as those offered by semasiology and the concept of the “action sign.” Overlapping interests with linguistic and cognitive anthropology are described. The emergence of a holistic “anthropology of human movement” has raised new research questions that require new resources. Theoretical insights have challenged researchers to devise new methods and to adopt or devise new t...

Moving Bodies, Acting Selves

Introduction: Tripartite naturalistic ethics Part I. Factitious Moral Virtue: 1. Identifying the hard core of virtue ethics 2. Rearticulating the situationist challenge to virtue ethics 3. Attempts to defend virtue ethics 4. Factitious moral virtue Part II. Factitious Intellectual Virtue: 5. Extending the situationist challenge to responsibilist virtue epistemology 6. Extending the situationist challenge to reliabilist virtue epistemology 7. Factitious intellectual virtue Part III. Programmatic Conclusion: 8. To see as we are seen: an investigation of social distance heuristics.

Character as Moral Fiction

1. Introduction: 'bourgeois philosophy' and the problem of the subject Part I: 2. The Kantian aftermath: reaction and revolution in modern German philosophy Part II: 3. Necessary conditions for the possibility of what isn't: Heidegger on failed meaning 4. Gadamer's Hegel: subjectivity and reflection 5. Negative ethics: Adorno on the falseness of bourgeois life 6. The unavailability of the ordinary: Strauss on the philosophical fate of modernity 7. Hannah Arendt and the bourgeois origins of totalitarian evil 8. On not being a neo-structuralist: remarks on Manfred Frank and romantic subjectivity 9. Leaving nature behind: or, two cheers for subjectivism: on John McDowell Part III: 10. The ethical status of civility 11. Medical practice and Social authority in modernity Part IV. Expression: 12. The force of felt necessity: literature, ethical knowledge, and the law 13. What was abstract art? (from the point of view of Hegel) 14. On becoming who one is: Proust's problematic selves.

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

This Essay considers the problem of understanding intellectual sharing/pooling arrangements and the construction of cultural commons arrangements. We argue that an adaptation of the approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators to commons arrangements in the natural environment may provide a template for the examination of constructed commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environment(s) within which they are embedded and with which they share interdependent relationships. Such an improved understanding is critical for obtaining a more complete perspective on intellectual property doctrine and its interactions with other legal and social mechanisms of governing creativity and innovation. We propose an initial framework for evaluating and comparing the contours of different pooling arrangements with an eye toward developing an understanding of the institutional and structural differences across arrangements and industries as well as the underlying contextual reasons for such differences. The proposed approach would draw upon case studies from a wide range of disciplines. Among other things, we argue that a theoretical approach to cultural constructed commons should consider rules pertaining to membership criteria, contribution and use of pooled resources, internal licensing conditions, management of external relationships, and institutional forms along with the degree of collaboration among members, sharing of human capital, degrees of integration among participants, and whether there is a specified purpose to the arrangement.

Erin Striff

Papers

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life