The article systematically explores the compatibility of Hume's political philosophy and contractarianism by reconstructing Hume's criticism of the idea of a social contract. In a nutshell, the dispute concerns the theoretical ...

Hume developed an original and revolutionary theoretical paradigm for explaining the spontaneous emergence of the classic conventions of justice-stable possession, transference of property by consent, and the obligation ...

It is assumed that medical guidelines specify the appropriate amount of a divisible good which each individual should receive. Individual requirements and probabilities that the treatment is successful if an appropriate ...

The classical or frequentist approach to statistics (in which inference is centered on significance testing), is associated with a philosophy in which science is deductive and follows Popper's doctrine of falsification. ...

This paper explores, and rejects, the plausibility--advanced by a number of economists and recently re-affirmed by Robert Nozick--of employing an `invisible hand explanation' to account for the existence of money as a ...

These days, statisticians often deal with complex, high dimensional datasets. Researchers in statistics and machine learning have responded by creating many new methods for analyzing high dimensional data. However, many ...

The article describes a radically simplifying model of opinion formation processes. The model abstracts away almost everything. A very common reaction to such an approach is the objection that important factors are not ...

Sen's critique of the homo economicus conception of choice asserts that agents who `displace' their goals, and instead choose on the basis of others', are not therefore irrational. I first defend Sen against the objection ...

This paper uses the concept of power to analyze Machiavelli's The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius. This helps to distil the elements that form the Machiavelli program that has its short-term ...